The way things normally work at Ivey Business School (part of Western University in London, Ontario) is that economist Mike Moffatt would trundle along doing his professorial thing, posting yet more analyses of Mayoral local unemployment claims to his blog.
Except… a fortnight ago (9th March 2014), he happened to stumble upon a cryptogram in an envelope inside a book on the shelves at the University’s D. B. Weldon Library. This puzzle has grown to bug him so much that he’s now offering $100 (presumably Canadian dollars, but still ~90 USD, ha!) to anyone who can crack it.
Hey, welcome to my world, Mike. 😉
Curiously, the act of blogging about what he’d found encouraged library staff and various others to reveal or find seventeen others apparently in the same series (e.g. here, here, here and here, and more may well turn up over the next few days, who can say?), all folded neatly in little white envelopes hidden in other books in the same library. Oh, and each envelope also contains either a coloured toy ‘gem’, a feather, or a leaf (many with two coloured dots of paint): endearingly, the object is repeated as an coloured icon in the Wingdings-a-like font used to print out the pages.
Chris Demwell produced a transcription of the first cipher, which showed that it has too many glyphs (about 50) to be a monoalphabetic (simple substitution) cipher: while other people have allegedly had a crack at it, but without making any obvious progress so far, it would seem.
Oddly, several of the notes are cryptographically identical (e.g. #3 and #5 differ only in the colour of the gem, but I think there are other pairs too), so there are actually fewer than 18 different cryptograms to crack. Cryptologically, the frequency instance distribution is far from perfectly flat, while a number of glyph sequences recur between notes, which would seem to point away from almost all tricksy modern crypto stuff, and instead towards the wobbly world of hand-picked homophonic ciphers.
But no, I don’t think it’s the Zodiac Killer back to taunt us with pink feathers and pictures of jugs and Ikea tables (I don’t think that’s what his vision of “paradice” was at all). But zkdecrypto might possibly be the right tool for the job, who can say? It’s early days…
I don’t know, though: I’m more of an historian, so this is all a bit fey for my liking, a bit too consciously an art-school-meets-Slashdot-and-everyone-loses gig. But there seems no obvious reason why these cryptograms shouldn’t be crackable, in that they look more like a hand-rolled ‘peasant’ cipher system than heavy duty crypto. But given that that’s true of the Voynich Manuscript too, maybe that’s an assessment that’s still slightly premature. What do you think? 🙂
PS: a tip of the missing hat to Dennis H for flagging this to me, much appreciated!
Well, the ‘eye of horus’ — falcon eye make up for the Pharaoh.
The old yin/yang symbol. Four leaf clover. An open fire. A suckerfish or “lamprey” ….
Kinda reminds me of a really old song: “I’m looking over a four-leaf clover — which I overlooked before”….
No, I am not as old as the song!
🙂
Looks like a version of Wingdings, doesn’t it?
Well — my husband sez it reminds him of the song lyrics: ‘chestnuts roasting on an open fire….” (Excerpt from a Christmas carol).
BTW: m’ dad used to roast chestnuts (real chestnuts) in the coals of our wood-fireplace. Most of our native (US) chestnut trees have succumbed to a blight.
What are ‘wingdings’, Diane?
bird and eye of horus at least from hieroglyphs?
Don
I’ve been trying to ID each of the five objects on the notes. I’m still stuck on the frame and the pillow, which are pretty generic, but I have the other three.
The table is a birch coloured Lack from IKEA, code 401.042.70, the glass is also from IKEA, a 14oz Godis design, code 200.921.07. The vase is an LSA Flower Posy Vase.
It looks like the image of the pillow is one that’s used on Amazon and a couple of other sites selling pillow inserts.
I didn’t find a brand, but it does come up pretty high on a Google Image Search for ‘pillow’, so it could just be a random image selection by the puzzle’s creator.
Helen: the guy noted that all five came at or very near the top for Google Image searches, so that may well be all there is to it, it’s hard to say.
The one thing that sticks out to me is the fact that all symbols are (drawn?) precisely the same as though typed from a special font.
Escher7: the notes were almost certainly (as the guy points out) printed on a colour laser printer.
A Valentine’s Day Treasure Hunt? I sure hope it wasn’t a proposal for marriage!
Another unusual characteristic: the first 17 symbols are non-repeating and with only a couple of repeats the uniqueness goes up to about 28 symbols. It would be highly unusual if not impossible for this to occur in English, ( unless done by design). It could happen with some sort of rolling cipher.
A follow-up Nick. Unless I am mis-counting, all 4 of the sheets I have copied use the same pattern. That is the first 17 symbols do not repeat and the 18th does. Could be a coincidence or a clue to underlying pattern.
Seventeen happens to be the length of the longest isogram in English, or at least what a quick google search says is the longest (subdermatoglyphic).
Max: thanks! I shall remember “subdermatoglyphic” for the next Christmas cipher quiz I set. 😉
In the case of the Weldon Ciphers, it’s perhaps more likely to be some kind of homophonic cipher rather than a monoalphabetic (simple) substitution cipher, though. I’ve got more to post on that in a few days’ time…
Just found an (possibly) interesting clue. This is a post from another website:
“They didn’t make the font. These appear to be taken from other fonts. I found the fishhook here: http://www.identifont.com/list?4+hook+4+2LT+1+9HK+1+KHZ+1+1WHY+1+27MZ+1
Other items seem harder to search for as they are very common, but maybe someone with more time could find them. In that font the fish hook is the letter g.
Posted by: AM | 03/24/2014 at 07:02 PM”
What is encouraging is that the font this person claims was the source of the fish hook used the hook as a “g”. When I created my font I used “A to Z” and then ” a to u” for the 47 characters in the leaf note, and guess what: the fish hook was a “g”.
I have been working on the Weldon Ciphers. This is what I have came up with. The last four lines of cipher are the message. The preceding lines are the symbols that represent the letters. The first of the last four lines decodes to” FATUQIV “, or QUI VAFT (MULTITUDE WHO). The second of the last four lines decodes to, ” XLENGRP “, or XLRG PEN. The XLRG-1 was a glider plane with a bomb attached to it that carried two pilots and twelve men in the center with five additional men on each side for a total of twenty-four men. The PEN was a German U-BOOT BUNKER along the French Coast in WW2. The third of the last four lines, “LPEIGRP “, decodes to GRIPPLE (Tool Used for Installation and Maintenance of Wire or Barbed Wire Fencing). The fourth and last line decodes to, ” BWACFZ “.