Review of “Cracking Codes & Cryptograms for Dummies”…

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With my book publisher hat on, I’d guess that the pitch for this book probably said: “Codes! Ciphers! Cryptograms! Masonic stuff! For Dummies!” And yes, the authors (Denise Sutherland and Mark E. Koltko-Rivera) pretty much seem to have delivered on that basic promise. But… is it any good?

Bear with me while I sketch out a triangle in idea-space. On the first vertex, I’ll put recreational code-breakers – the Sunday supplement sudoku crowd. On the second vertex, hardcore cipher history buffs – David Kahn groupies. On the last vertex, historical mystery / conspiracy fans – Templars, Masons, Turin Shroud, HBHG, Voynich Manuscript etc.

“Cracking Codes & Cryptograms for Dummies” sits firmly on the triangle’s first vertex, but I have to reaches out only fairly lamely (I think) to the other two vertices. Structurally, its innovation is to tell three stories where you need to solve a long sequence (100, 80, and 55 respectively) of individual cryptograms to find out what happened. Quite a few of the ciphers use well-known cipher alphabets, such as Malachim, Enochian, and various Masonic pigpens: there are also a few trendy puzzle ciphers (such as predictive texting ciphers formed just of numbers).

Compare this to its big competitor (Elonka Dunin’s “Mammoth Book of Secret Codes and Cryptograms”) which sits on the same first vertex. Elonka’s book has quite a few more puzzles, is structured both thematically and by ascending difficulty, and sticks to plaintext: it also has a 40-page section on unsolved ciphers (the VMs, the Dorabella Cipher, Phaistos Disk, etc), but with no real pretense at trying to precis Kahn’s “The Codebreakers”.

For me, Cipher Mysteries sits on the opposite edge of the triangle (i.e. between hardcore cipher history and, errm, softcore cipher mysteries) to both of these, so I’m probably not the right person to judge which of the two puzzle books is better. Elonka’s book is easy to work your way through (but feels a bit more old-fashioned): while Sutherland & Koltko-Rivera’s book is lithe and up-to-the-minute (but feels less substantial, in almost every sense). OK, the first is more cryptologic, the second more puzzle-y: but ultimately they’re doing the same thing and talking to the same basic audience.

Really, I guess puzzle book buyers would do well to buy both and make up their own mind which of the two they prefer: but sadly I have to say that most Cipher Mysteries readers might prefer to buy neither. But you never know!

Rene’s voynich.nu relaunch…

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As should be pretty clear from my posts over the years, I’m a big fan of René Zandbergen: he’s one of the very few Voynich researchers that have managed to keep a consistently clear head over the years, and it is his generally even-handed approach that casts a pleasantly affable shadow over voynich.nu, the website he put together many years ago and still one of the few genuinely useful general-purpose Voynich research resources in Internetland. (Please don’t get me started on the uselessness of the Wikipedia page, I want to keep this under 1000 words).

And so in many ways the news that René has now taken back control of voynich.nu (he stopped updating it in 2004, and then handed it over to Dana Scott to look after for a few years) and begun an HTML makeover on it comes as a very pleasant surprise. It’s already looking much better, and no doubt it will carry on improving for a while yet.

I suppose the key question, though, boils down to this: really, what have we learnt about the VMs in the last six years? And how does the whole voynich.nu programme fit in with where we are now?

It’s important to remember that René’s website, for all its substance, is not some kind of “Encyclopaedia Voynichiana“, trying to compile every comment ever made on every feature, drawing, paragraph, line, word, letter. Rather, it concerns itself at least as much with the historiography of the VMs as with the VMs itself. For some people, that is a strength: yet for me, that remains its central weakness. The basic historiographic problem is that the VMs’ provenance shudders to an awkward halt circa 1608, even though it is (demonstrably, I believe) significantly older than this – in fact, if the recent radiocarbon dating is broadly reliable, the VMs probably predates its appearance at the Rudolfine court by more than 150 years. Which is a bit like trying to use Twitter to grasp the dynamics of Queen Victoria’s court.

What, then, should a 2010 voynich.nu look like? In many important ways, we’ve lost all the major archival battles: Marci pointed us to Kircher and Kircher pointed us to Baresch (and that was the end of that), while Rudolph II and WMV jointly got us to Sinapius (and that was the end of that). All of which formed a pleasant historical pear tree to climb, but ultimately one with no fruit, low-hanging or otherwise. We have all the pathology of a history, but none of the substance: for all the patient research fun trawling the archives can be, this approach has not helped us.

And from where I’m sitting, the minute we start defocussing to allow the tsunami of historical possibilities and dead-end theories to wash over us (Wikipedia, anyone?), we’ve basically lost the epistemological fight too. The annoying thing about the VMs is that even though it really is, as I once noted, like a million piece jigsaw, it would probably only take 20 or 30 carefully chosen observations about Voynichese to unlock its cipher. But which 20 or 30 would be the key? We’ll only know in retrospect, I guess. 🙂

Perhaps a revised voynich.nu circa 2010 should focus not on its (let’s face it, fairly damaged and unhelpful) historiography, but rather on what we’ve genuinely learnt about the VMs in and of itself: by which I mean things like…

  • the difference between Currier A and Currier B (and all the shades inbetween)
  • reconstructing the original page order
  • places where the cipher breaks down and/or is hacked (such as space insertion ciphers)
  • apparent copying errors
  • letter stroke construction and variations
  • document constructional details, gatherings vs quires
  • marginalia
  • internal layering
  • the various painters
  • handwriting differences and evolution

All of which is very “Voynich 2.0”, but there you go. Really, we do now know a great deal about the VMs that isn’t to do with Marci, Newbold, Brumbaugh, etc: in fact, we have plenty of reasons to be optimistic if we but allow ourselves to be!

Review: Michael Jacobson’s asemic books…

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A few days back, two small book-shaped things arrived in the post: and I’ve been pondering what to say about them ever since. In fact, I’ve been struggling to work out what I think about them… you’ll see what I mean in a moment.

You might superficially compare them with, for example, Luigi Serafini’s famously unreadable book: however, I have relatively little doubt that, beneath all its overevolved, madly-mutated faux-alien language tropes, Codex Seraphinianus does actually express some kind of coherent linguistic knot that might ultimately be untied, whereas Michael Jacobson’s “asemic” books claim to be actively meaningless. That is, while they play with the form of narrative and abstract expressive shape, they don’t actually say anything – any kind of meaning you take away from them is your problem (or, conversely, your gift).

Perhaps the right way to classify them, then, is as some kind of visual anti-poetry, a kind of Dada take on the postmodernist anti-meaning turn. Which is to say: if all texts are ultimately meaningless in themselves (and only incidentally form meaning in the reader’s mind), then why are you surprised that these books are too?

Alternatively, perhaps there is actually a hidden higher-level message, so that if you turn the pages upside down and squint your eyes in just the right way, what emerges is something along the lines of “The Magic Words are Squeamish Ossifrage“, etc. So, a good part of the fun is working out whether there’s a joke (and if there is, whether it’s on you).

Whatever your particular take happens to be, I think you can still enjoy them purely on their own visual merits: for all their (claimed) lack of meaning, Michael’s two books do jump with a refreshingly jazz-like joy:-

  1. Action Figures (which seems to have started life in an exercise book) is, I would say, the weaker of the pair: I get the impression of an early youth (mis)spent with a spray can, trying as a young man to give expression to the same basic urges, but channelling them within structural rules (such as minimizing shape repetition, consistency of line, etc). Neat, but Mayan street-whimsical rather than obviously challenging.
  2. The Giant’s Fence is, by comparison, a far more sophisticated objet d’art, even if it is apparently influenced by Max Ernst’s Maximiliana. Here, Jacobson seems to have developed a confidence with his medium that lets him play not only with the interior calligraphic form but also with the structural rules within which they live. Shapes, gaps, multi-line things gradually intrude into the overall text-like flow, their waxing and waning presences driven by a subtly astrological metronome, where the passage of time from page to page has a enjoyably slow, quasi-geological feel. All in all, a nicely done piece that hints that Jacobson has more to come.

You can download your own free copy of Action Figures from the Literate Machine website here, though you’ll have to pay a princely £2.99 to download your own Lulu-ized copy of The Giant’s Fence.

Personally, I see asemic writing (the overall category in which these books live) as sitting on quite a different table to cipher/language mysteries, so I’m not hugely sympathetic to the suggestion that (for example) the Codex Seraphinianus, the Phaistos Disc, or the Voynich Manuscript are themselves asemic. However, it is certainly true that people project all kinds of bizarre historical narratives onto these, to a degree to which asemic writers can only faintly aspire: perhaps such vicariously vivid visions ultimately form a family of warped interpretational artworks all their own, a kind of semantic complement to asemic writing. “Asemic reading”, perhaps?

Voynich theory roundup…

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Even though the Internet would appear to be full of Voynich theories, Tardis-like there’s always room for just a few more: so here are some recent ones for you to feast upon. Today’s mission, should you choose to accept it, is simply to try to categorise them: satirical, apparently deranged, serious, April Foolery, brilliant, channeled, etc.

  1. Well-known Internet palaeographer (and Australian donkey-owning grandmother) Dianne Tillotson has a theory that the VMs was written by one Leonard of Quim.
  2. Online Shakespearean theorist Franz Gnaedinger has raised Richard SantaColoma’s theory to dizzying new heights: he believes the VMs “was written and drawn by Francis Bacon in 1622, as a private sequel to the highly successful Nova Atlantis, written in a pseudo-Polynesian idiom allowing page-filling automatic writing, and drawn in a deliberate retro-style honoring Francis Bacon’s ancestor Roger Bacon. The text is gibberish but makes allusions.“
  3. Sergey K suggests (by email) a new chronology for the Voynich Manuscripts, based on some dates apparently marked in blue paint in the SW rosette: “1441 dates of the making of the Voynich MS. 1574  JOHN DEE has bought the Voynich MS. 1597 (in this place my monitor very dirty) August. The Year and month when Edward Kelley  has finished the painter (colouring) of the book and run out from the prison.“Ros1574
  4. Chy Po, who has been studying the VMs for many decades, believes that “The sketches are Red Herrings & have nothing to do with the text, however they tell a tale of their own cautioning people not to be misled“, while the text is in “a Secret almost extinct language, perhaps impossible to crack as it is a variation of a One Time Pad.” However, “the name of this language is known to very few who guard it jealously, but even is was made public it would be of no help without those exact pages of the Pad which obviously cannot exist still.  I have strong suspicions that it is a copy of an handwritten book called “v**z H******g’ very few copies of which exist to be passed on to the next worthy disciple, if no one is deemed to be worthy then that particular copy is destroyed.“

Here, the satirical is clearly (1) [Leonard of Quim is an Ankh-Morpork character], the April Foolery is (3) [thanks for that, Sergey], while (2) bravely outdoes his virtual mentor Rich SantaColoma by a whole order of magnitude. As for Chy Po, perhaps the answer to the VMs, when it eventually arrives, will indeed fit this kind of “concealed secret language” template, who knows? But as to whether the book in question is called “vuoz Habsburg” (or whatever), you’ll have to work out for yourself.

Really, who would be me? Some days, I have to admit that not even I would be me.

New d’Agapeyeff cipher site…

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Not much to say about Tiago Rodrigues’ new d’Agapeyeff cipher site, except that he summarises the existing cipher analyses pretty well and adds a few of his own thoughts (such as splitting the search space into two 7×14 blocks to try to make it significantly more manageable). Apart from wanting him to change his outbound links from the Voynich News blogger site to the Cipher Mysteries WordPress site, I’d say he’s done a good job of putting together a pretty good starting point. 🙂

(Incidentally, my three d’Agapeyeff pages are here, here, and here.)

Go Oilers…

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So there I was in my first awesome week working at the B: my room mate Lynina kept saying that I was so ‘Legally Blonde’, and I was like “but do I have a dog? No? Well, I don’t think so”. And then she just kept on about the East Coast / West Coast thing, and I’m like “so now I’m Tupac? Well, duh.” But working in the cube is just so cool that it, like, transcends all that stuff in an totally I.M.Pei way. And when I say that, Lynina just rolls her eyes and I say “what? what?” and she lifts up her Renaissance News and Notes so I can’t see her face and we both laugh until we cry and then we both have to do our makeup again.

Actually, I always do well at interviews because, you know, I bought those totally serious-looking frames (even though I don’t need glasses at all, don’t tell anyone) and I think really hard of that guy who said “never make the interviewer laugh, but never let them forget you either” so I frown and try to conjure up the most like wild high cultural stuff I can until their head is spinning. Works for me, anyhow.

So anyway, I’m like four days (nearly a whole week, if you’re counting) into the job, and I’ve done the induction and the cleaning and the coffee round, and it’s my turn on the desk, and there’s a buzz from the guard upstairs and only The Maddest Mad Guy Ever turns up. You know, the one at the top left of the Do Not Let These People See The VMs montage pinned to the drawer that holds the snakes and the magnifiers, ringed in like red felt pen and stuff. But I’m new there and I don’t know this yet, so I’m like “Sure you can see MS 408, sir. Do you have a particular research question you’re trying to answer?”

At this point I notice he’s shaking, and I’m thinking he’s got some kind of palsy but actually it’s because he can’t believe he might actually be able to get to see the manuscript, what with it being digitized so that the curators can Just Say No To Mad Guys Like Him. So I say, you know, making light conversation, Sir, what kind of Oil is your hat made of? And he stops dead, looks at me as though I’ve just torched his favourite pet, and replies “what?”

So I say, when I was inducted here they told me that people who ask for MS 408 often wear some kind of rare oil-based hat, all the while I’m looking at his cap which, like, just happens to be for the Edmonton Oilers hockey team. He says  “there’s nothing under the cap” in this totally intense way, and I’m thinking of Forbes Smiley and say can I check your cap, sir, and he says what exactly are you looking for and I say it’s this really rare oil, Tynph Oil or something, that we mustn’t let near our manuscripts.

And so he half-lifts up a corner of his cap and there’s just this balding head thing underneath (pretty gross, he must have been like fifty or something), and I’m thinking about people cutting out maps with concealed blades and someone said that there was this weird map-like fold-out page in MS 408, so I say can I see inside your cap?

He’s shaking even worse now and lifts up his head and there’s this flash of crinkly metallic light under there and I’m thinking it’s a blade, it’s a blade, omigod it’s a blade, so I reach down into the drawer for a miniature LED flashlight to look closer at it but when I turn back he’s gone – disappeared, running up the stairs. And that’s when I notice his red-ringed face on the top left of the whole Do Not Let These People page and I feel really stupid, for the first time since like 3rd grade or something, when I got my own name wrong in a test. OK, so I was just a kid and my mom had remarried, and I felt under pressure to carry on maxing my grades: but all the same.

Like, I can’t believe I actually nearly completely let a blogger handle MS 408? So how totally bad is that?

Barbara Barrett’s VMs Fortean Times article…

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At long last, Barbara Barrett’s Fortean Times article, “Voynich Under the Microscope“, has been published – and (for now, at least) it seems to be freely available on the web, which is very nice – read it quickly and buy a copy of FT anyway. 🙂

Ostensibly, it’s an update following the ORF TV documentary’s radiocarbon dating and microscopic analysis: but actually, Barbara seizes the opportunity to right a whole bunch of perceived Voynichological wrongs. For instance, she dismisses the whole “humanist hand” notion as a palaeographical misconception stemming from a 1976 comment by Rodney Dennis (a Harvard librarian) that has somehow hardened into a mistaken orthodoxy. She also dismisses all late-15th century theories (she’s doubtless far too polite to say *cough* “Leonardo”) based on the radiocarbon dating range, though whether she also intended to include 1465 (*cough* “Averlino”) I’m not sure – radiocarbon is good stuff, but is it really that good?

She has a little bit of a dig at unnamed bloggers’ casting doubts on the whole “written on fresh vellum” thing, keeping things fallaciously open in order to maintain otherwise untenable dating hypotheses. Well… I at least am still waiting for the data to turn up before I jump. As an exercise in historical reasoning, all the varied kinds of evidence we get have to dovetail with each other: and in this case, the evidence train may have left the station, but it most definitely has not yet arrived at its destination. The VMs’ patina formation, calcination, vellum gelatinization, etc – these are things I would really love to read about, but will that paper ever get written? Barbara seems to imply that she suspects it won’t, caught in a kind of research ownership turf war… but can that really be true? If true, what an abysmal waste! 🙁

Enjoy! 🙂

PS: though I liked Barbara’s mixed metaphor of “deflating a sacred cow”, it did also make me wonder what manner of holy flatus it was inflated with in the first place…

Voynichese ololol (lol!)

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Don’t worry, this will be the last Voynichese trivia post for a good few days (I’ve had enough myself). 🙂

If you remove all the spaces (both genuine-looking ones and space-insertion-cipher-like ones) in Voynichese, a slightly different set of patterns emerge (this is one of Marke Fincher’s favourite tricks). I thought I’d have another quick look at multiple repetitions of various verbose pairs in this space-less transcription…

Here are the raw instance counts, and their relative percentages of the unrepeated instance counts:-

  • qo = 5168, qoqo = 9 [0.17%], qoqoqo = 0 [0%]
  • ot = 2679, otot = 3 [0.11%], ototot = 0 [0%]
  • ok = 2961, okok = 7 [0.24%], okokok = 0 [0%]
  • op = 407, opop = 0[0%], opopop = 0 [0%]
  • of = 122, ofof = 0 [0%], ofofof = 0 [0%]
  • ol = 5238, olol = 186 [3.55%], ololol = 13 [0.25%]
  • al = 2885, alal = 60 [2.08%], alalal = 1 [0.035%]
  • or = 2619, oror = 87 [3.32%], ororor = 1 [0.038%]
  • ar = 2815, arar = 161 [5.72%], ararar = 7 [0.25%]

Yes, it’s a load of dull statistics to make your brain ache. But what jumps out at my eyes from this is that the ol/al/or/ar verbose pairs appear repeated many times more than the other high-frequency pairs (such as ot and ok: note these counts are with all the qo pairs removed first). From this, I conclude that qo/ot/ok/op/of all have one kind of statistical behaviour, while ol/al/or/ar have another statistical behaviour entirely.

Specifically, my guess is that the pairs in the first set appear in doubles roughly once every 500 instances (and never three times in a row) simply as a result of scribal copying errors, and that this gives us a rough idea of how frequent copying mistakes probably are in the VMs. My other guess is that ol/al/or/ar are genuinely meant to be in the ciphertext both twice and three times in a row (I somehow doubt the scribe could miscopy a pair three times in a row), and that these are quite probably Roman numerals in the plaintext.

Discuss!

The evolution of Voynichese…?

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Even though René Z likes to tut-tut Voynich speculation (and usually with good reason, it has to be said), there’s something about the maturity and cohesion of Voynichese as a system that makes me quite sure that, unlike Athena, it did not suddenly spring forth fully-grown (and, indeed, fully-armed) from its parent’s forehead. I further infer that the author probably made a major personal investment in the Voynichese system over a long period of time – and given that it has held its secrets safe for over half a millennium, perhaps the author’s likely pride in his/her accomplishment was reasonably justified. That is, perhaps just as with Trithemius’ cryptography mere decades later, the system itself was no less a secret than its contents. 😉

Moreover, the notion that the system was accreted over time might well explain much of the fluency of the script design and the assurance of the document execution (though this much has been noted many times before). In “The Curse of the Voynich“, I made various attempts to turn the clock back to the pre-history of Voynichese, i.e. to use the letter-shapes themselves as a basis for speculating how they evolved and ended up in their final form. Of course, without Marty McFly’s Delorean (or Tom Riddle’s diary, for that matter), tempus will always fugit leaving historians clutching at long-blown-away straws: but perhaps there are some clues here that can help us peer through the fog of time…

My starting point here is that I believe the conceptual roots of the Voynichese cipher system lie not in tricksy Renaissance stateful ciphers, but in far simpler stateless ciphers and steganography, all of which were standard fare for the Quattrocento. Hence, I predict that the “ar” / “al” / “or” / “ol” 2×2 grid of verbose pairs (which I discussed in yesterday’s post) was part of an earlier (much simpler) verbose cipher that was designed to disguise the kind of repeated letters found in Roman numerals (i.e. III / XXX / CCC / MMM): and that what we see now evolved out of that earlier stateless system. It is certainly possible that the looped “l” character was originally designed to steganographically hide an “x”:-

VoynichRomanNumerals

However, this wouldn’t be much of an improvement, so you’d then need to add in hacks such as space insertion ciphers to disguise the verbose patterns: and you’d perhaps then need to add yet another system to handle small numbers (such as the a[i][i][i]r system shown above). And then you’d perhaps need to add in a second (Arabic number, aiiiv?) system… but that’s another story. All in all, this is the kind of cipher evolution I’m talking about: and what makes it speculative is that we only have the end-result of the evolution.

Now… what I’m actually wondering about at the moment is whether anyone has looked through examples of 15th century ciphertexts and cipher ledgers to see if there are any examples of people constructing verbose-pair cipherbets specifically to allow themselves to hide Roman numerals in enciphered texts. While the precise details of the execution may well be quite different, it could be that if we can find examples of the idea in action, we might be able to start tracing some kind of additional behind-the-scenes intellectual history vector for it – where it came from, what kind of person used it, who those people were connected to, etc. I have a few ideas for how to do this, which I’ll (hopefully) try out soon, see if they lead anywhere…

Is Voynichese stateless or stateful?

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If you combine the thoughts I posted yesterday (suggesting that the “o[r]aiiv” word in the top line of f67r1 might encipher “luna”) with the “or oro ror” sequence on line #2 of f15v (which would appear to be a verbosely enciphered Roman numeral, probably “CCCC”), the two would superficially seem to be incompatible. How can the Voynichese “or“-pair encipher both “L” and “C” simultaneously?

Discarding wilfully ambiguous cipher systems (such as Brumbaugh’s “convert everything to a digit and then back to a letter), the answer would be a stateful cipher system, by which I mean a cipher system which reuses the same output letters according to which one of a set of internal states it occupies. Voynich theorists typically predict that the gallows would be the main state-switching mechanism (though Steve Ekwall also asserts that “c” / “cc” / “ch” change the internal state as well – this is what all his “folding and flipping” claims specifically relate to).

Arguably the first known stateful cipher was proposed in Alberti’s De Cifris in 1467: this was a cipher disk pair where the rotor disk rotated relative to the stator disk according to an arrangement between encipherer and decipherer (typically every few words).

Now, to modern cryptographic eyes, the whole point of per-character stateful ciphers (such as Vigenère etc) is to destroy both the numerical statistics as well as the linguistic structure of the ciphertext, as they provide two layers of information that can be used to help break that text. However, this does not seem to have been the case with Alberti’s cipher, while it certainly does not seem to be the case with Voynichese, where there is apparently both visual and statistical evidence of word structure.

Yet Voynichese uses only an alphabet-sized set of characters in its cipherbet, so does not seem to be relying on a secondary codebook at all (even Alberti’s cipher disk used a secondary codebook), so one of the few ways in which it can obfuscate its output over so many pages of ciphertext is via some form of primary statefulness.

However, there seems to be no direct evidence that Voynichese uses only statefulness: rather, it gives the impression of retaining some kind of high-level linguistic structure from the plaintext, but perhaps with letter patterns disrupted within that.

To me, the likelihood is that Voynichese evolved out of what was initially a purely stateless verbose cipher, one where (for instance) “or”, “ol”, “ar” and “al” enciphered the repeated letters in Roman numerals: M C X I. The encipherer probably then hacked his/her own system (with tricks such as the space-insertion cipher we apparently see on f15v) to hide too-obvious repetitions. However, I suspect that an Arabic digit steganography hack was later grafted into the system (the a[i][i][i]v family), probably removing the need for the “I”: and that when the time came round to creating the VMs, some kind of additional stateful disruption might well have been added to this system, whereby the or/ol/ar/al pairs swapped around depending on the state… well, that’s as far as I’ve got, anyway.

Historically, the problem is that there is no evidence of any stateful cipher system prior to Rome in 1465 (when Alberti began researching his book), which doesn’t obviously seem to square with the radiocarbon dating. All the same, it’s not the first time that different forms of dating have yielded slightly different values for the same artefact, all grist for our historical mills… 🙂