History: Not the First Treasure Hunt

Larva Labs recently released their Protoglyph as part of the first Proof Collective Grails event. Hidden at the very top was a row of alternating “L” characters, which seemed to be separate from the generative part of the work. A clever codebreaker noticed this, and ended up decoding the message to read “The secret is in the pig numbers, LL” (read the Twitter thread here, or listen to the interview here). Following this clue eventually led the hunters to the private key for a secret wallet containing a Meebit. Treasure hunted ✅.

The story was fun to read, but it also begged the question: could this be the only treasure hunt Larva Labs hid among the Meebits? Kevin Rose hinted recently that he thinks there might be more, and mentioned how strange the tattoo attributes are on the Meebits. That was enough of a spark to make me want to dive in!

Understanding the Tattoo Attribute

The tattoo attributes are indeed suspicious, especially because it seems like there would be far simpler ways to express the tattoos. It’s not that complex, though, once you break it down.

Each tattoo is on a square grid of either 3 or 4 units across. The height of the tattoo is determined by the number of letters, one for each row. Each row is comprised of one of six patterns, as illustrated here:

You’ll never see a 4-across character mixed with a 3-across character in a tattoo, the columns above are always distinct. Also, if a Meebit has only one tattoo string (like GTZG), it has a single tattoo on its right arm. If it has two strings (like SBLF,SBLF), the tattoo is on both arms and both tattoos are always exactly the same.

Of course, you can’t look at that graphic and not think about the tattoo patterns translating to 1s and 0s, especially after that’s how the “L” clue started the Protoglyph hunt. So here’s that:

There are many questions outstanding, like why are these particular letters chosen to represent these combinations? But let’s pocket this information for now and move on to the next piece, which seems to confirm there is indeed a treasure hunt here.

The Normal Factor Semidirect Product

If you start browsing or parsing the Tattoo attribute page on the Meebits site, you might notice something strange. There are four phantom tattoo properties that do not conform to the above pattern, and don’t even seem to exist. Instead of using letters, the properties use ⋉ and ⋊ (the unicode names for these are the Left and Right Normal Factor Semidirect Product characters).

Four of these properties are nestled among the other tattoo properties on the page, but unlike every other link on this page, they lead to 0 search results. The four strange tattoo attributes look like this:

That looks a lot like the beginning of the “Pig Numbers” clue, with these left and right characters as 0s and 1s.

Indeed, if you take just the first sequence in each set (I discarded the second because it mirrors the first), and try every possible combination of ordering these, then convert ⋉ to 0 and ⋊ to 1, one of the sets will look like this:

Each set was originally 12 characters for a total of 48. To convert to text, we’ll put a break in between each set of 8 numbers and see what’s revealed: 

01001100 = L
01000001 = A
01010010 = R
01010110 = V
01000001 = A
01001100 = L

Decoding LARVAL (Larva Labs) seems to confirm we’re on a path here. How might this lead to a treasure? Does the encoding method of tattoos have anything to do with this mystery? Surely the order of the ⋉⋊⋉⋊⋉⋊⋊⋉⋉⋊⋉⋉,⋉⋊⋉⋊⋉⋊⋊⋉⋉⋊⋉⋉ tattoos has something to do with the solution, as does their choice to use this particular obscure symbol. Or does it?

Stay tuned for Part 2 by following dubdee on Twitter.