The Solution - Puzzle #1

I thought that those of you who tried your hand at the puzzle contest, might how to see how to solve puzzle #1 (yes, that means there will be a puzzle #2). I asked the winner, Mike Fassio, to send me some brief thoughts on it and here (slightly annotated) is his reply:

“First off I immediately noticed that the code was made up of elements from the periodic table so I spent some time tracking down all of the element names. I didn't see any sort of pattern emerge from the element names like if you took the first letter from each element name or something, so then I found out the atomic number of each element in hopes that there would emerge a pattern from the numbers. At this point I began to think entirely too hard about the numbers that I had written down. I tried breaking the lines of code down into as many combinations of numbers that were less than or equal to 26 (number of letters in the English alphabet). […]

I was beginning to become really frustrated and was certain that it was a more complicated puzzle since you had a 2 month time limit on it. I noticed that the atomic numbers were all primes and I began looking for ways to break prime number codes, particularly those that utilize the RSA algorithm. Then all of a sudden it hit me that the clue to the cipher was in the explanation of the riddle: "A prime example of an elementary cipher." Finally it all made sense, the cipher was 26 prime numbers which corresponded to 26 letters in the English alphabet. From there it was just simple substitution and I arrived at the solution: Email me this answer at jmplummer at aol dot com.”

I think that explains it rather well. I’m planning to post a second puzzle on January 1st, when I’ll be giving away a copy of the game Ra. Stay tuned!