(Solution)

Document 2.5: The Road Signs of Unspeakable Chaos

Your boss wrote:

I was consulted by the Minister of Transportation of the Realm of Unspeakable Chaos on a crisis they had. It turns out that a road sign was missing from their inventory and they needed a replacement. (This sign is an important clue.) Fortunately I was able to help him, since the road sign was available from another country. I've attached part of the inventory, which was hashed using the MD5 algorithm, then MIME base64 encoded, then lexicographically sorted.

Chaotians use the same language for road signs as they do for flags. (See earlier fieldwork notes from the Realm of Unspeakable Chaos at
http://web.mit.edu/puzzle/www/01/Solutions/chaotic.html.
The 2001 puzzle about flags and the Realm of Unspeakable Chaos is at:
http://wweb.mit.edu/puzzle/www/01/phase4/09/index.html for the puzzle or
http://web.mit.edu/puzzle/www/01/Solutions/realm.html for the solution.) Road signs are different from flags in a number of ways:

All signs describable by the language should be present in a complete inventory (except of course those putting a shape on a background of the same color). Thereby explaining the name of the country!

(Example: a sign with a yellow background and two white leftward-pointing arrows in a black diamond is represented in the road sign language as "magare nasty enprety um pe dril babo" and is encoded as "XjDYbSl87wVZWBgZNGyTrg".)

The inventory extract:

gqw3TySaYqOTZW9XCB6thg
gqxBkD1hviJa381RtX9j/w
gqxKTxx27GEzTxtjUpPk4A
gqxlM0HeX1W6tDoeHh4caw
gqz+CTdlImCyoyQzcNFiOg
gqzriZm+YEqx8oDacUHayQ
gr+v34NhI4T9a5xTI8LD0Q
gr0PcapQomm1gmoTN/Lg2A
gr3/eyWh5JUmWzF7mZAbsA
gr3cuLIao1pUQKgzoB/LOA
gr6xFSKEedh0kunf/C9alQ
gr70tH6I3oyBNyFW1s0GlQ
gr7fjQFTtDJgxeuag8Xeeg
gr7pknsbnnE8uh6zlNuYxA
gr9bzpI1aPsbgfOsbRX98g
gr9cOWNd5b8sDWz3YbwV9Q
grBFyEduGDjIu9rGDYMRvA
grCZNqWWyGjV2fyyWxdR5Q
grDcIugVWW0R2M34SXaIuw
grF9z2T5PcHp3EsfyabXRw
grFYmMyMT75nN0e24emvZg
grIM8KuZ/DVQAUi4B2LYyA
grJA4Yo/fEgqpB6biMV26g
grJC/G5vgvpHw6zzQVhJvA


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