Codes on film!

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I think that there will always be films based around codes because they give screenwriters such an “easy in”. Just saying “code” conjures up…

  • Dark secrets (e.g. heresy undermining The Church, free energy undermining The Market, occult powers, any old stuff really)
  • Powerful interests (usually multiple conspiracies fighting each other behind the scenes for control of ‘The Secret’)
  • A central McGuffin that is small enough to be concealed, smuggled and fought over in hand-to-hand combat in an implausible (often underground) location
  • Highly motivated central character(s) who, though technically prepared for the challenge, rapidly find themselves out of their depth in every other sense
  • (and so on)

Do you need to know much more than the title to construct the film poster? No wonder film companies like codes so much! I’m immediately reminded of Mercury Rising (which I saw again recently, and sort-of enjoyed), but also the 2010’s The 7th Dimension which is just being premiered. Personally, I tend to avoid films where any of the main characters are billed as “hackers” like the plague, but then again that might be because I’m a computer programmer by trade – if I was a dentist, perhaps I’d have done the same for Marathon Man, who knows? 🙂

Anyhow… an historical cipher-themed film I’m genuinely looking forward to is The Thomas Beale Cipher, a short animated film by Andrew S. Allen that has already premiered and should be out on the international festival circuit during the rest of 2010. Details are (probably deliberately) sketchy right now (for example, the YouTube sampler video for the film has been withdrawn), but there is a Facebook page to whet your appetite a little – I’ll let you know of any screening dates.

Not quite so high on my list of upcoming historical code films to look for is The Ancient Code, to be distributed by Warner Brothers. This has apparently been in production for a couple of years, and gives every impression – from the fairly PR-centric set of materials on the website – of being a set of talking heads talking their heads off about different aspects of holism, surrounded by faux-psychedelic video editing effects. It’s true that the film-makers have  assembled a fairly, well, eclectic set of heads to do their talking thang: but it’s hard to see how Nick Pope, Tim Wallace-Murphy, Philip Gardiner, and even Johnny Ball (the former children’s TV presenter who you may recall attracting some criticism in late 2009 for his particularly colourful denial of climate change) amount to a gigantic hill of gravitas re ancient wisdom and codes concealed through the ages. But all the same, I’ll continue to try hard to swim against the tide of unconvincingness the film seems to be sweating from every pore, so wish me luck in that endeavour. 🙂

And finally… clicking onwards from The Ancient Code’s not-so-ancient website leads us neatly to Philip Gardiner’s upcoming The James Bond Code, which struggles valiantly to connect Ian Fleming’s (anti)hero James Bond with alchemy and gnosis (apparently via voodoo and numerology). There’s even a fan music video based on the book, which frankly even I’m struggling to grasp any kind of rationale for. Doubtless there’s some kind of film optioning angle going on here too. Honestly, would anyone apart from a rather fevered PR hack call this “The Thinking Man’s Da Vinci Code“? [Nope, not a hope, sorry.] But all the same, there you have it, so feel free to add it (or not) to your own personal list of, errm, ‘hysterical historical hypotheses’, along with Gavin Menzies’ 1421 & 1434, Edith Sherwood’s “Leonardo da Vinci wrote the Voynich Manuscript” theory, etc.

Jim Gillogly’s Beale sequence revisited…

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Some more thoughts on the curious “key” sequence in the Beale Papers…

Back in 1980, Jim Gillogly applied the Declaration of Independence codebook for the second Beale Paper (“B2”) to the first Beale Paper (“B1”), and discovered a very unlikely sequence in the resulting text: ABFDEFGHIIJKLMMNOHPP. The chance of the middle section alone (“DEFGHIIJKLMMNO”) occurring at random is about one in a million million, and what is even spookier is that the two aberrant letters in the longer sequence (“F” near the beginning, and “H” near the end) are one entry off from correct letters in the codebook (195 = “F” while 194 = “C”, and 301 = “H” while 302 = “O”).

Gillogly attributed these to encoding slips: but given that I’m wondering whether this string is perhaps a code-sequence of some sort, could it be that the encoder used a slightly different transcription of the Declaration of Independence from the one he/she used for B2? This would yield systematic single-number shifts: so let’s look again at the key-sequence and the adjacent letters in the B2 codebook:

112 T R G A I
18  P B W H C
147 T A O T A
436 L B A P U
195 C F L A T  <-- Gillogly's first apparently offset code
320 I D O T E
37  A E S T W
122 P F S T W
113 R G A I A
6   O H E I B
140 I I T R O  <-- this code might possibly be offset too?!
8   E I B N F
120 T J P F T
305 P K O G B
42  T L O N A
58  O M R R T
461 H M H H D
44  O N A O N
106 P O H T T
301 T H O T P  <-- Gillogly's second apparently offset code
13  O P T D T
408 O P U T P
680 C A U B O
93  C W C U R

Today’s observation, then, is that if the errors in the Gillogly key sequence arose from having used a slightly different codebook transcription of the Declaration of Independence and that the key string should have been ABCDEFGHIIJKLMMNOOPP (as seems to have been intended), then we have two definite (but possibly even three) places where the B1 codebook transcription may have slipped out of registration with the B2 codebook transcription: the code used for the first “I” (141) could equally well have been 140, because that also codes for “I”.

Yet because the sequence is long enough to contain codes that seem correct either side of these errors, we have the possibility of determining the bounds of those stretches in the B1 transcription where the variations (in this scenario) would have occurred. Specifically:-

122 P F S T W
 ?? -1
140 I I T R O
 ?? +1
147 T A O T A
147 T A O T A
 ?? -1
195 C F L A T
 ?? +1
 ?? +1
301 T H O T P
 ?? -1
305 P K O G B

So, if this scenario is correct, it would imply that (relative to the B2 codebook) the B1 codebook transcription dropped a character somewhere between #147 and #195, gained two somewhere between #195 and #301, and then lost another one between #301 and #305. There’s also the possibility that a character was dropped between #122 and #140 and then regained between #140 and #147… not very likely, but worth keeping in mind.

Between #147 and #195, the B1 code usage table looks like this (20 instances):-

148
150 150 150 150 – 154
160 – 162
170 – 172 – 176 176
181 – 184 – 189
191 – 193 – 194 194 194

Between #195 and #301, the B1 code usage table looks like this (64 instances):-

200 200 – 201 201 – 202 – 203 – 206 – 207 – 208 208
210 – 211 211 212 212 – 213 213 – 214 – 216 216 216 216 216 216 216 – 218 218 – 219 219 219 219
221 221 –  224 – 225 – 227
230 230 – 231 – 232 232 – 233 – 234 234 234 – 236
242 – 246 – 247
251
261 – 263 – 264
275 275
280 280 – 283 283 – 284 284 – 286
290 – 294

So, this proposed mechanism would offset up to 84 codes from B1, which may be sufficiently disruptive to have caused B1 to appear undecodable to cryptological luminaries such as Jim Gillogly. It is also entirely possible that (just as with the B2 codebook) there are other paired insertions and deletions to contend with here.

There’s an interesting observation here that many of the transcription errors in the B2 codebook fell close to 10-character (line) boundaries: if this is also the case for some of these (putative) B1 codebook transcription errors, then we should be able to reduce the number of possible variations to check.

The Beale Papers Paradox…

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It seems as though penetrating public cryptographic analysis of the three Beale Papers (B1, B2, and B3) halted abruptly in 1980 when Jim Gillogly pointed out a problem with B1. If, as he pointed out, you apply to B1 the same dictionary code used for B2 (famously derived from the Declaration of Independence), you get a ciphertext with some distinctive properties:- 

SCS?E TFA?G CDOTT UCWOT WTAAI WDBII DTT?W TTAAB BPLAA ABWCT
LTFIF LKILP EAABP WCHOT OAPPP MORAL ANHAA BBCCA CDDEA OSDSF
HNTFT ATPOC ACBCD DLBER IFEBT HIFOE HUUBT TTTTI HPAOA ASATA
ATTOM TAPOA AAROM PJDRA ??TSB COBDA AACPN RBABF DEFGH IIJKL
MMNOH PPAWT ACMOB LSOES SOAVI SPFTA OTBTF THFOA OGHWT ENALC
AASAA TTARD SLTAW GFESA UWAOL TTAHH TTASO TTEAF AASCS TAIFR
CABTO TLHHD TNHWT STEAI EOAAS TWTTS OITSS TAAOP IWCPC WSOTT
IOIES ITTDA TTPIU FSFRF ABPTC COAIT NATTO STSTF ??ATD ATWTA
TTOCW TOMPA TSOTE CATTO TBSOG CWCDR OLITI BHPWA AE?BT STAFA
EWCI? CBOWL TPOAC TEWTA FOAIT HTTTT OSHRI STEOO ECUSC ?RAIH
RLWST RASNI TPCBF AEFTB

Here you can see not only tripled letters (AAA, PPP), quadrupled letters (TTTT) and even quintupled letters (TTTTT), but also (and this is the part that ignited Gillogly’s cryptographic curiosity) the sequence ABFDEFGHIIJKLMMNOHPP. Even if you restrict your view to the DEFGH IIJKL MMNO monotonically increasing sub-sequence in the middle, the chances of that appearing at random would be (he calculates) about one in a million million. Making it even more improbable is the fact that the aberrant “F” near the start has code 195 where code 194 is “C”, and the aberrant “H” near the end has code 301 where code 302 is “O”, which makes it look a great deal as though these were simply encoding slips. And if these were intended to be C and O respectively, the unlikeliness of the sequence vastly increases again. 

Yet as far as the multiple letter groups go, we can do some simple probability calculations based on the 1321 characters Gillogly lists for the B2 codebook. From frequency analysis – T 255, A 167, O 145, H 80, I 69, S 62, F 62, P 59, W 59, C 53, B 48, R 41, D 37, E 36, L 35, M 30, U 28, G 19, N19, J 10, K 4, V 2, Y 1, X 1, Q 1, Z 0 – you can see that T, A, and P occur 19.3%, 13.5%, and 4.46% (respectively) of the time in the codebook. So, if the text letters were picked at random (as would pretty much be the case if B2’s codebook was completely the wrong codebook for B1), the chances of these patterns occurring randomly at least once in a 520-character sample would be something like this:- 

  • prob(TTTTT) = 1 – (1 – 0.193^5)^(520-(5-1)) = 12.9%
  • prob(TTTT) = 1 – (1 – 0.193^4)^(520-(4-1)) = 51.2%
  • prob(AAA) = 1 – (1 – 0.135^3)^(520-(3-1)) = 72.1%
  • prob(PPP) = 1 – (1 – 0.0446^3)^(520-(3-1)) = 4.5%

You would also expect to see a copious amount of TT and AA pairs scattered through the text, which is in fact exactly what we see (13 x TT and 10 x AA, quite apart from the TTTTT, TTTT and AAA listed above). 

And therein lies the basic Beale Papers paradox: though the distribution and clustering seem to imply that B2’s codebook was not B1’s codebook, the ‘Gillogly sequence’ seems to imply that the two are linked in some way. So, what’s it to be? Damoclean swords aside, how can we unpick this cryptologic knot? 

My observation here is that if there is also some kind of monoalphabetic substitution going on (i.e. in addition to the Declaration of Independence codebook), then it’s quite possible that the Gillogly sequence represents the keyword or keystring used to generate that substitution alphabet. This might well explain the doubled letters within the keystring (i.e. the II MM and PP): if so, we would be looking for a keystring with four doubled letters but where none of the vowels repeat. 

ABCDEFGHIIJKLMMNOOPP 

Hmmm… there can’t be many English words ending with two adjacent doubled letters: in fact, the only two I can think of are coffee and toffee (please let me know if you can think of any others!) ‘Toffee’ doesn’t sound very promising, so could it be ‘coffee’? The previous word would then need to end with “C” to make a doubled letter… not hugely promising, but perhaps it’s a start!- 

ABCDEFGHIIJKLM MNOOPP
xxxxxxxxxxxxxC COFFEE
xxxxxxxxxxxxxT TOFFEE

Alternatively, it might be a three letter word, like “TOO” or “OFF”. Had Eric Sams considered this, doubtless he would have happily constructed all kinds of valid key phrases that fit these constraints, such as:-

ABCDEF GHIIJ KLMMNO OPP
CLUNKY SPEED RABBIT TOO

OK, it’s true that the key phrase to the Beale Papers is not going to be “CLUNKY SPEED RABBIT TOO”, but maybe (just maybe) it’s a step in the right direction. 🙂 

Incidentally… the Wikipedia Beale Papers page notes that “In 1940, the famous cryptanalyst, Dr. White of Yale University, came close to solving the Beale ciphers after tracking down the suspected key hidden by Beale in St. Louis—he never spoke of his findings.” Though I did a bit of Internet sleuthing to try to work out who this Dr White was, I didn’t really get anywhere – I don’t think he was the Maurice Seal White (b.1888) who wrote the 1938 book “Secret writing : how to write and solve messages in cipher and code” (which I found listed in Lou Kruh’s bibliography and Worldcat) and who was a Columbia alumnus in 1920 (see p.212 here), but it’s hard to tell. Please let me know if you find out!

All about the Chaocipher…

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I’m getting a bit cheesed off with the Internet: every time I do a search for anything Cipher Mysteries-ish, it seems that half Google’s hits are for ghastly sites listing “Top 10 Unsolved Mysteries” or “10 Most Bizarre Uncracked Codes“. Still, perhaps I should be more grateful to the GooglePlex that I’m not getting “Top 10 Paris Hilton Modesty Tips” and its tawdry ilk.

Realistically, there is only one uncracked code/cipher listing on the web from which all the rest get cut-and-pasted: Elonka’s list of famous unsolved codes and ciphers. But Elonka Dunin has long since moved on (coincidentally, she went from cryptography into computer game production at about the same time that I made the reverse journey), which is perhaps why all of these lists look a bit dated. Perhaps I should do my own list soon (maybe, if I had the time).

Happily, Elonka did manage to nail most of the usual suspects: the Beale Papers, the Voynich Manuscript, Dorabella, Zodiac Killer, d’Agapeyeff, Phaistos Disk, and so on… each typically a piece of ciphertext which we would like to decipher in order to crack a historical mystery. However, one of the items on her list stands out as something of an exception.

For John F. Byrne’s 1918 “Chaocipher”, we have a description of his device (the prototype fitted in a cigar box, and allegedly contained two wheels with scrambled letters), and a fair few examples of both Chaocipher ciphertext and the matching plaintext. So, the mystery isn’t so much a whodunnit as a howdunnit. Though a small number of people are in on the secret mechanism (Lou Kruh, for one), Byrne himself is long dead: and the details of how his box of tricks worked have never been released into the public domain.

Was Byrne’s Chaocipher truly as unbreakable as he believed, or was it no more than the grand delusion of an inspired cryptographic outsider? This, really, is the mystery here – the everything-or-nothing “hero-or-zero” dramatic tension that makes it a good story. Yet hardly anybody knows about it: whereas “Voynich” gets 242,000 hits, “Chaocipher” only merits 546 hits (i.e. 0.0022% as much).

Well, now you know as well: and if you want to know a little more about its cryptography, I’ve added a Chaocipher page here. But the real site to go to is Moshe Rubin’s “The Chaocipher Clearing House“, which is so new that even Google hasn’t yet found it (Moshe emailed me to tell me about it, thanks!) Exemplary, fascinating, splendid – highly recommended. 🙂

OK, enough of the raw factuality, time for the obligatory historical riff. 🙂

I’m struck by the parallels between John Byrne’s device and Leon Battista Alberti’s cipher wheel. Both men seem to have caught the leading edge of a wave and tried to harness its power for cryptography, and made high-falutin’ claims as to their respective cipher systems’ unbreakability: whereas Alberti’s wave was mathematical abstraction, Byrne’s wave was (very probably) algorithmic computing.

Circa 1920, this was very much in the air: when J. Lyons & Co. hired the mathematician J.R.M. Simmons in 1923, the company was thinking about machines, systems, and operational management: mathematical calculators were absolutely de rigeur for them. The first Enigma machines were constructed in the early 1920s (and used in a commercial environment), and there were doubtless many other broadly similar machines being invented at the same time.

Do I think that there was anything unbreakable in Byrne’s box? No, not really: the real magic in there was most likely a programmatic mindset that was cutting-edge in 1918, but might well look somewhat simplistic nearly a century later. But I could be wrong! 😉

New Beale Papers Theory…

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Word arrives at Mysteries Mansion from “Fred Jones / Will Smith” about his/her shiny new Beale Papers theory: “Yes the codes are broken! I am giving them out free for all to see at http://www.bealetreasurecodes.com ”

As everyone knows, Part 2 was decoded in the original 1885 pamphlet (though the precise details of how the decoder silently worked past where the encoder misnumbered the words in the Declaration of Independence text have caused a fair few modern cryptologists to suspect the whole thing might be some kind of hoax): but what of Parts 1 and 3? You know, the bits that say where the treasure is hidden. 🙂

If you hack through all the foliage (Jefferson? Templars? What?), Jones/Smith’s claim is that if you apply a modified part of the plaintext of Part 2 to the first few lines of Part 1 (so that “71, 194, 38, 1701, 89, 76, 11, …” maps to “INTHECOUNTYOFBEDFORDABOUTFOURMILESAQUADRANTAWAYFROMBUFORD” you get some kind of cunning mix of French and English fragments in the remainder, which (once he’s filled in the gaps) he claims reads as follows:-

In the county of bedford about four miles a quadrant away from buford then here by ahan need ban o tug de a tac foam ruth ci in en but heath narrow mount tut by aire aid t blockade utterly the lentuer stagnation defunt having hag note aerial sa middle ninth bar …

Ohhhhkayyyy… it’s at this point I throw my hands up in the air and simply point out that this looks not entirely dissimilar to Levitov’s VMs descryption (and, though GC will disagree, to Leonell Strong’s claimed VMs decryption too) – a kind of polyglot mishmash of language-like fragments, not unlike hurling a bowl’s worth of Alphabetti Spaghetti at a wall and trying to piece together the resultant letter gloop into sentence-like things. Oh well…

Smith/Jones has put up two (quite big) pages already with more planned over the next few days/weeks: perhaps he/she will have plenty of surprises for us for Part 3. We shall see!

Review of “The Agony Column Codes & Ciphers”…

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A few days ago, chess-playing crypto guy Tony Gaffney emailed Cipher Mysteries about “The Subtelty Of Witches” in the British Library: I also blogged about his attempted solution to the Dorabella Cipher and the (not-very-)Ancient Cryptography forum where he often posts on historical ciphers. Since then, the copy of his 2005 book “The Agony Column Codes & Ciphers” (which he wrote under the byline “Jean Palmer”) I ordered has arrived… but is it any good?

(Incidentally, “agony columns”  in Victorian newspapers were originally for readers to post personal announcements and messages about/for missing friends and relatives: while “advice columns” (which became popular in the 1950s) were actually a continuation of an eighteenth century newspaper feature known as “letters to the lovelorn“, as well as the advice column in popular magazine “The Lady’s Monthly Museum”. All of which means that the phrase “agony aunt” is a kind of uneasy linguistic marriage between two quite different types of newspaper column.)

People liked the ability to leave messages in agony columns: but some,  wishing to remain anonymous, submitted their messages in code, in cipher, or in some other cryptic manner. Tony’s book collects together 1000 of these (simultaneously public and private) messages.

On the one hand, I can well appreciate the compositional agony of transcribing so many ciphertexts (which themselves may well have been scrambled by harried typesetters) and then trying to decipher them (which may not always be possible). I can also appreciate that a collection of these could well offer a nice commuter alternative to the sheer maddening pointlessness of Sudoku (oh look, all the numbers add up… and here’s my station).

On the other hand, who (apart from cipher history junkies such as me) would really connect with the content of such a project? Stripped of background, context, and outcome, the results are – if you go through your own agony of deciphering them – typically no more than fleeting half-scenes from lost Victorian soap operas, full of thwarted & hopeful love and clandestine meetings.

Structurally, the book comprises a series of dated cipher fragments sorted into chapters according to the newspaper in which they appeared (The Times, The Morning Chronicle/Observer, etc) and sorted by date, with a cipher key listed at the end for most (but not all) of the enciphered ones. All very logical and sequential as a reference work: but does it really work as a piece of cipher solving entertainment?

With my historical cryptography hat on, I’d say yes: the reader is presented with a cleaned up set of cipher transcriptions, with exactly as much information as a curious newspaper reader of the day would have had. It’s straightforward and clear, a nice little slice of cipher history.

But with my publisher hat on, I’d say no: as an editor, I would have discarded the merely cryptic, and rearranged the same material as a series of enciphered threads graded by difficulty, so that a commuter could engage with it as if it were a cipher puzzle-book. I’d also have opted for a larger page size, and included pre-printed solving grids and a sorted frequency count for all monoalphabetic ciphers.

(A fine example of this kind of cipher puzzle book is Elonka Dunin’s (2006) “The Mammoth Book of Secret Codes and Cryptograms”, which also briefly describes the Voynich Manuscript on pp. 489-493, as well as the Beale Papers, the Dorabella Cipher, the Zodiac Ciphers, and the Phaistos Disk).

I would also have moved all the (currently) unsolved ciphers to an end chapter, together with brief failed solving notes.

On balance, then, I’d say that the cipher historian side of me enjoyed the book, but the cipher puzzler side of me felt frustrated by its structure. However, because I would guess that cipher puzzlers outnumber cipher historians 100:1, perhaps it might be an idea for Tony to revisit this project, to Elonka-ify it?

“Ancient Cryptography” forum…

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Tony Gaffney, a chess player / tournament organizer I knew back in the early 1980s when playing for Hackney Chess Club, made some fascinating comments to my recent blog post on The Subtelty of Witches and Eric Sams’ attempted solution to the Dorabella Cipher.

Firstly: having spent a looong time in the British Library looking at ciphers (you’ll see why shortly), Tony was happy to tell me that it in fact has three encrypted books, all using simple monoalphabetic ciphers:
(1) MS Add. 10035 “The Subtelty of Witches” (Latin plaintext),
(2) Shelfmark 4783.a.30. “Ebpob es byo Utlub, Umgjoml Nýflobjof, etc. (Order of the Altar, Ancient Mysteries to which females were alone admissible: being part the first of the Secrets preserved in the Association of Maiden Unity and Attachment.)” London, 1835. (English plaintext)
(3) Shelfmark 944.c.19. “Nyflobjof es Woflu” (Mysteries of Vesta), pp.61, London 1850 (?). (English plaintext).

Secondly: without realising it, I had already seen an early version of Tony’s own proposed Dorabella decipherment in the comments to the Elgar article on the BBC Proms website, attributed to one “Jean Palmer”. You see, back in 2006, this was the pseudonum Tony used to write (and POD publish through authorsonline) a book containing a thousand (!) furtively ciphered messages that were placed in (mainly Victorian) newspapers’ personal columns: I shall (of course) post a review of this “Agony Column Codes & Ciphers” here once my freshly-printed copy arrives.

It turns out that Tony is also a frequent poster (under the name “Tony Baloney”) to an online code/cipher cracking forum called Ancient Cryptography I was previously unaware of (probably because its definition of “ancient” seems to extend only as far back as 1450, Bible Codes [pah!] excepted). The forum has specific threads devoted to the d’Agapeyeff Cipher, the Beale Papers, Zodiac Killer Ciphers, and the Kryptos Sculpture (for example), as well as some delightful oddities such as a link to recordings of shortwave Numbers Station broadcasts (coded intelligence messaging). If you want a friendly online forum for discussing attempts to break these historical ciphers, this seems like a sensible place to go.

But back to Tony Gaffney: given that he deciphered a thousand (admittedly mainly monoalphabetic substitution) messages, it should be clear that he is no slouch on the decrypting front. Which is why it is interesting to lookat the latest version of his proposed solution to the Dorabella Cipher. As far as I can tell, this involves simply using exactly the same cipher crib as appears in Elgar’s notebook (?), but interpreting the text that comes out as having been written in a kind of phonetic-style backslang. Here are the two stages (note that the hyphens are inserted as part of the interpretation, not part of the transcription):-

Deciphered:  B-ltac-ei-a-rw-unis-nf-nnellhs-yw-ydou
Anagrammed:  B-lcat-ie-a-wr-usin-fn-nshllen-wy-youd
Plaintext:   B hellcat i.e. a war using effin' henshells(en)? why your
 
Deciphered:  inieyarqatn-nte-dminuneho-m-syrr-yuo
Anagrammed:  intaqraycin-net-dminuenho-m-srry-you
Plaintext:   antiquarian net diminuendo?? am sorry you
 
Deciphered:  toeh-o-tsh-gdo-tneh-m-so-la-doe-ad-ya
Anagrammed:  theo-o-ths-god-then-m-so-la-deo-da-ay
Plaintext:   theo o' tis god then me so la deo da aye

On the one hand, I’d say it is more plausible than Eric Sams’ proposed solution: but on the (inevitably negative) other hand, it doesn’t quite manage to summon the kind of aha-ness (AKA “smoking-gunitude“) you’d generally hope for – as Tony’s book no doubt amply demonstrates, the point of a secret love note (which is surely what Elgar seems to have sent Dora Penny?) is to be both secret and to convey something which could not openly be said. But is this really it?

Some people like to say that the real point of tackling apparently unbreakable ciphers is to be found in the travelling rather than in the arriving – that the real prize is what we learn about ourselves from butting our horns against that which is impossible. To which I say: gvdl zpv, bttipmf.

Review of “The Six Unsolved Ciphers”…

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…or, in all its prolixitous glory, “The Six Unsolved Ciphers: Inside the Mysterious Codes That Have Confounded the World’s Greatest Cryptographers“, by Richard Belfield (2007). It was previously published by Orion in the UK as “Can You Crack the Enigma Code?” in 2006.

You’d have thought I’d be delighted by this offering: after all, it covers the Voynich Manuscript, the Beale Papers, Elgar’s “Dorabella” cipher, the CIA’s Kryptos sculpture, the Shepherd’s Monument at Shugborough, and the “Zodiac Killer” ciphers, all things that a Cipher Mysteries blogger ought to get excited about. But there was something oddly disconsonant about it all for me: and working out quite why proved quite difficult…

For a start, if I were compiling a top six list of uncracked historical ciphers, only the Voynich Manuscript and the Beale Papers would have made the cut from Belfield’s set – I don’t think anyone out there could (unless they happened to have cracked either of the two) sensibly nitpick about these being included.

Yet as far the other four go, it’s not nearly so clear. I’ve always thought that the Dorabella cipher was a minor jeu d’esprit on Elgar’s part in a note to a dear friend, and most likely to be something like an enciphered tune. The Kryptos sculpture was intended to bamboozle the CIA and NSA’s crypto squads: and though it relies on classical cryptographic techniques, there’s something a bit too self-consciously knowing about it (its appropriation by The Da Vinci Code cover doesn’t help in this regard). And while the Shugborough Shepherd’s Monument (Belfield’s best chapter by far) indeed has hidden writing, placing its ten brief letters into the category of cipher or code is perhaps a bit strong.

Finally: the Zodiac Killer ciphers, which I know have occupied my old friend Glen Claston in the past, forms just about the only borderline case: its place in the top six is arguable (and it has a good procedural police yarn accompanying it), so I’d kind of grudgingly accept that (at gunpoint, if you will). Regardless, I’d still want to place the Codex Seraphinianus above it, for example.

Belfield’s book reminds me a lot of Kennedy & Churchill’s book on the Voynich Manuscript: even though it is a good, solid, journalistic take on some intriguing cipher stories, I’m not convinced by the choice of the six, and in only one (the Shugborough Shepherd’s Monument) do I think Belfield really gets under the skin of the subject matter. While he musters a lot of interest in the whole subject, it rarely amounts to what you might call passion: and that is really what this kind of mystery-themed book needs to enliven its basically dry subject matter.

It’s hard to fault it as an introduction to six interesting unbroken historical codes and ciphers (it does indeed cover exactly what it says on the tin), and perhaps I’m unfair to judge it against the kind of quality bar I try to apply to my own writing: but try as I may, I can’t quite bring myself to recommend it over (for example) Simon Singh’s “The Code Book” (for all its faults!) as a readable introduction to historical cryptography.

PS: my personal “top six” unsolved historical codes/ciphers would be:-

  1. The Voynich Manuscript (the granddaddy of them all)
  2. The Beale Papers (might be a fake, but it’s a great story)
  3. The Rohonc Codex (too little known, but a fascinating object all the same)
  4. John Dee’s “Enochian” texts (in fact, everything written by John Dee)
  5. William Shakespeare’s work (there’s a massive literature on this, why ignore it?)
  6. Bellaso’s ciphers (but more on this in a later post…)

Feel free to agree or disagree! 😉

Beale Papers: solved (or not)?

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Here’s a claimed solution to the Beale Papers (but press Cancel on the login popup, and if browsing there under Windows, I wouldn’t advise installing the ActiveX control that pops up) which I didn’t know about until very recently. I thought I’d mention it here because, as any fule kno, the Beale Papers are one of the few encrypted historical mysteries to parallel the Voynich Manuscript to any significant degree.

To be precise, the Beale Papers comprise not one long ciphertext (putting the VMs’ thorny Currier A-B language continuum issue to one side) but three short codetexts, all allegedly dating from 1819-1821: part 2 was publicly announced in 1885 already solved (for its codebook, the encoder used a slightly mangled/miscopied version of the Declaration of Independence)… but the directions to the buried treasure were in the undecoded part 1, while the shorter (and also undecoded) part 3 listed the people involved. Of course, only someone who has broken the two remaining codes would know if all of this is true or not. 🙂

So, it’s basically a kind of Wild West bandit take on a pirate treasure map (which to me sounds like an Alias Smith and Jones script, oh well) but made obscure with some kind of dictionary code: all of which is reassuringly familiar if you’ve just read PopCo. Confusingly, some people argue that the Beale Papers are a fake (possibly by the promoter of the 1885 pamphlet, or even by Edgar Allen Poe, etc), claiming justification from statistical aspects of the cryptography and/or on claimed anachronisms in the language, etc: but a definitive answer either way has yet to be found.

For what it’s worth… my opinion is that, as with the VMs, cries of hoax are more Chicken Licken than anything approaching an ironic postmodernist reading. Really, it does look and feel basically how a home-cooked Victorian code-text ought to, with an emphasis towards lowish numbers (up to 350) plus a sprinkling of higher numbers (possibly for rare or awkward letters): Jim Gillogly’s observation (in October 1980 Cryptologia) of an alphabet-like pattern in part 1 (if you apply part 2’s codebook) seems to me more like a clue than a reason to reject the whole object as a hoax. As an aside, a few years ago I heard (off-Net) whispers of one particular cryptographic solution that had yet to be made public: but Louis Kruh in Cryptologia reported several such plausible-looking solutions as far back as 1982, so what can you say?

However, all of this is an entirely different claim to the “Beale Solved” code solution linked above, which was (re)constructed by Beale treasure hunter Daniel Cole (who died in 2001). Even though the dig that was carried out as a result of Cole’s decryption revealed an empty chamber (the website claims), the cryptographic details (ie, of how the codetext links with the plaintext) have yet to be released… which is a tad fishy.

A quick check of the first page of Cole’s version of part 3 reveals that he didn’t read it as a simple cipher or codebook, because repeated code-numbers only rarely get decoded as the same letter (for example, the five instances of ’96’ get decoded as “s / e / r / h / n”). Yet this seems somewhat odd: if there was some kind of strange offsetting going on, the distribution of code-numbers would not need to so closely resemble the kind of distribution you see in code book ciphers.

But once you confess to having taken a single step down the whole “it’s actually a strange cipher pretending to be a codebook code” route, nobody will believe a word you say, right?

Review of "PopCo"…

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I’m a lousy fiction reviewer, probably for two main reasons: (1) creative writing classes taught me how to spot when writers are cheating (in order to make me a more honest writer myself); and (2) years of Voynich Manuscript-related research has made me constantly alert for infinitesimal details upon which the answer might just hinge.

Put these two together (a lie-detector and an adrenaline-fuelled eye for detail), and you have a completely unfair toolkit for reading novels, simply because novels are very rarely actually “novel” – they’re more often an assembly of ideas.

Take Scarlett Thomas’ “PopCo” (FourthEstate, 2004), for example. Superficially, it’s like a 500-page anagram of my life (BBC Micro / chess / maths / philosophy / Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem / videogames / business / marketing / cryptography / cryptology / secret history / Voynich Manuscript / etc), together with a load of other untaken doors (Bletchley Park / SOE / crosswords / vegetarianism / vegan / Go / low-level drug-use / homeopathy / etc), and it’s written quite well: so I really should be engaged by it, right?

Problem #1 is one of construction: the first tranche is basically Douglas Coupland (specifically Microserfs), the second tranche Iain Banks (his fiction rather than his science fiction), then a bit of Martin Gardner’s puzzle columns and Simon Singh’s The Code Book: there’s a kind of teenage girls’ magazine section along the way, and a rather clunky historical pirate romance, before it all flips out into Thomas’ fictional take on Naomi Klein’s No Logo… Yet to me, a book needs to be more than merely a collage of influences, a narrated scrapbook: but perhaps that makes me too old-fashioned for contemporary fiction. If you wanted to be kind, you might compare it with Kurt Schwitters‘ Merz, carefully arranged collections of found objects (forged Merz pieces get placed on eBay all the time): but sorry, Thomas is no Schwitters.

Problem #2 is the lack of parents. The other day, while watching (the original TV series of) Batman on BBC4, my four-year-old son asked me where Batman came from. Well, I said, a man called the Joker killed both Bruce Wayne’s parents, and when a bat bit him in the caves beneath his mansion, he somehow gained a super crime-fighting ability. OK… so where did Spiderman come from? Well, I said, after both Peter Parker’s parents died, he was bitten by a radioactive spider, and gained amazing spider-like powers. My son paused, looking back at the screen. But what about Robin, he asked. No, don’t tell me, I know: both his parents were killed… Before he had a chance to say “(and he was bitten by a radioactive robin)”, I suggested we look Robin up on Wikipedia (though sadly he was basically correct). In PopCo, the main character Alice Butler is basically Crypto Girl, a sort of Elonka-lite: her mother dies and her dad runs away, and she gains her m4d cryptological and prime factorisation sk1llz from her grandad. Put it that way, and it all looks a bit comic-book thin, doesn’t it?

Problem #3 is that I’m wise to novelistic conceits. I know that in a cryptological novel, someone called A[lice] is going to communicate with someone called B[en], who will pass on what she says to someone called C[hloe]: and this kind of spoils it. Incidentally, Ron Rivest denies that he used “Alice” and “Bob” (in his 1978 paper introducing RSA public-key cryptography) in any kind of homage to the film “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice” (which is actually a bit of a shame). It would also have been cool if PopCo’s Alice had been born in 1978 and openly named in crypto homage to Ron Rivest’s paper, but I think she’s too old (is she 29? I can’t find the page, rats!).

Problem #4: cringeworthy logic/maths puzzles. To give texture to her story, Thomas brings together loads of lateral puzzles and mathematical ain’t-that-amazin’ fragments, the kind of thing that you sometimes hear being trotted out at student parties. For example:-Two men go into a restaurant and order the same dish from the menu. After tasting his food, one of the men goes outside and immediately shoots himself. Why? (p.109) The explanation given for this in PopCo is ludicrous (it involves an albatross and a dead child, don’t get me started): but why is one not simply a food-taster for the other? Fugu: mmm, delicious… hey, what’s that trainee doing in the kitchen… aaaarrgggh!

Problem #5 (probably the biggest of all for a Voynichologist) is that PopCo uses the Voynich Manuscript as a MacGuffin (or do I mean a “Philosopher’s Egg MacGuffin”?). Alice’s grandfather spends years on the VMs, and even gets her to count the words and letters on each page (and later to factorise large numbers): perhaps washing his car would have been a better way to earn pocket money. Alice says that she’s learnt so much from the journey, from the search for the heart of the VMs: but really the manuscript is no more than occasional wallpaper for the narrative. The Beale Papers also make a brief appearance: my guess is that Scarlett Thomas would have used them as the central hook, had there been more than a paltry $20million dollars’ worth of treasure linked to them: the alternative “Stevenson/Heath” pirate cipher mystery Thomas constructs is a bit thin when held up against real ones, regardless of the size of its haul.

…and so on. I feel in a bad place: I really wanted to like PopCo, but all I can do is whinge (and I haven’t even moaned about her merging Alberti’s and Vigenere’s cryptography, etc). Other reviewers (such as here and here) seem basically to like the book: and compared to Dan Brown’s Digital Fortress (where I wanted to kill all the main characters by the end of Chapter One, all the minor characters by the end of Chapter Two, and the publishers by the end of Chapter Three) it’s Shakespeare.

Cryp-lit like this requires a certain kind of technical devotion from the reader, and if you are a diehard crypto-geek PopCo is something you really ought to read. But only if you’ve read the good stuff (like Neal Stephenson’s excellent Cryptonomicon) first.