Today, a homeless looking man handed me $50 and this note

The homeless looking man was probably a paid messenger. given that said guy gave op fifty dollars, his pay would have to be significantly larger to ensure proper delivery. so, lets assume the original source of the note paid at least 150.00 with said delivery fee, sans labor costs for the creation of the puzzle... OK

now, the implication here is that someone thinks they will get a return on their investment. for this to be plausible, op would have to have been deliberately targeted these to receive the puzzle. handing these little surprises out to strangers would not result in a good rate of return.

now, if you are still following my train of thought, it would make sense to assume that these people must have been watching op to think he would be a good candidate to solve the puzzle. yet, if they were they seem to have misprofiled him as he was not able to solve the puzzle alone and so he resorted to posting on reddit.

now, there are a lot of smart people on Reddit, but what are the odds that such a random puzzle would be solved so quickly and for nothing more than karma?

as much as I would like to believe the story, it seems that the simpler explanation would be that it is a fabrication and a viral marketing campaign. this would explain how a fairly complicated puzzle was answered quickly and easily by some redditor, as smart as some of them are I think the odds of someone with both the required skills and willingness to work only for karma finding the post are fairly improbable.

in conclusion we can apply occam's razor to the above argument, to illustrate that it was probably not a bonafide event when compared to these alternate explanations: the man was legitimately crazy (what are the odds if encountering a crazy person with such skills?) or the most likely explanation, that this is a marketing campaign perhaps for a new book, movie, game show, or something else entirely

the argument that op fabricated the story to me is the most convincing, precise and logically sound theory

I was on an 'L' train in Chicago recently, and saw all these weird ads about some guy who had supposedly been kidnapped. Turned out to be some viral marketing thing to try and get people to - get this - visit St. Louis.[1]

Gotta hand it to 'em, some of these initiatives are pretty clever.

Although it would be funnier if it turned out that the "homeless guy" was somebody doing some LARP / ARG shyte and just handed the note and the 50 to the wrong guy.

[1]: https://lonelybrand.com/blog/kidnapped-chicagoan-campaign-se...

Image: http://i.imgur.com/9yZo5.jpg

The sequence is: ?FIDI

Edit: Oh, presumably it's a "B" for Bifid (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bifid_cipher), and it reads top-down, left-to-right.

[1] http://forums.unfiction.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=35685

I say viral marketing!

Edit: removed extra yud on the end.

I think it might be more fitting if this was a new approach to recruit people for the NSA / Cryptography office for X company or organisation.

Google could hand out little cards like this anonymously to try to find smart people but the problem is someone would eventually turn to crowdsourcing.