Please Patiently Ponder Purported Poe Puzzle

grouchomarxist writes: "Salon has an article about a cryptograph attributed to a certain W. B. Tyler, possibly a pseudonym for Edgar Allen Poe. There is a $2500 prize for the person who solves the cryptograph." The Gold-Bug , which rates a mention in the Salon article, was by far the most spell-binding story in my old Horace Mann Reader, and it's the tale that first turned me on to The Divine Edgar. Could it be that the reason this cryptograph has remained unsolved for so long is that it is actually insoluble? Now that would be the ultimate posthumous practical joke. Even if you have no intention of trying to solve it, take a look -- the cryptograph itself is strangely hypnotic.

Comments

It'll get solved...

[Qwerty4]

...by someone with a lot of time on their hands. Anyone over at Andover wanna give it a shot?

Re:It'll get solved...

[Anonymous Coward]

The longest word (X!Q!C!mkU!y!w!e!k!a) in the cryptograph has 11 letters, the same as the word cryptograph. So line 13 could start with: cryptograph is a ???

Re:It'll get solved...

[Anonymous Coward]

Encryption doesn't always follow a direct correlative. Two different encryption keys might be used, their selection based on whether the numerical position of the letter in question was either odd or even.

wow, that's pretty weird

[Zen]

Okay, replace the most repeated letter with 'e' & see whatcha got. Work from there. I want a cut :)

Re:wow, that's pretty weird

[god_of_the_machine]

I would hope that Poe/Tyler would be more creative than simple letter replacement. I know that I came up with that one in grade school, so hopefully an intelligent person with an interest in cryptography would try to do a slightly better job than that! =)

A more light suggestion... maybe we should get D.net involved with this! =) I still have a few CPU cycles to spare!

Re:wow, that's pretty weird

[Bill Gates]

You're kidding about d.net right?

All the cpu cycles in the world won't help if you don't know how the cypher was encoded in the first place...Well, assuming the cycles aren't used for some as-of-yet-unknown artificial intelligence.

Re:wow, that's pretty weird

[god_of_the_machine]

Uou're kidding about d.net right?

Yeah, I was kidding. But you never know, it could be encoded using DES-III. That Poe fellow was ahead of his time! =)

Re:wow, that's pretty weird

[Zen]

True. He could also have gone by the same concept of The Great Gadsby, and not used the letter 'e' at all, regardless of how he encrypted it.

Re:wow, that's pretty weird

[PiMan]

You mean, Gadsby, not The Great Gatsby. Sorry to nitpick, I've just seen that mistake WAY too much :)

not hard

[Trollberito]

I'm sure somebody will probably figure it out in the next 12 hours. Won't be me since I'll be asleep.

It looks just like...

[BigTed]

An exam I took last year - Stage Three Electrical Engineering :-)

Just a thought...

[DgtlGhost]

Anyone else get the idea that MAYBE this thing is up-side-down, or backwards? If it is Poe's, then that would make the Salutation a signature instead. Just a thought. I'm not a cryptographer, but I've watched them on Tv...
Hey, new open source project, FreePoe! Set this thing up on Distibuted and lets get cracking! Damn, it's late.

-Earthman

Re:Just a thought...

[telematx]

Or perhaps two messages in one, since some letters go one way and others another. Or maybe it is one message, split in the middle and looped back on itself.

Someone should split it in two and run frequency counts on each section.

Won't work

[luckykaa]

There's 105 letters in this code (upper + lower case upside down and right way up + spaces)

But back to your point, for most simple substitution codes, you can also use the rule that t is the second most repeated letter, and most of the time "t?e" maps on to "the". Doesn't everyone know this?

Re:Won't work

[Anonymous Coward]

There's 105 letters in this code (upper + lower case upside down and right way up + spaces)

You missed something obvious. The puzzle contains 6 alphabets. It uses normal and inverted instances of Upper case, lower case, and small caps.
There are 156 possible letters in those 6 script systems altogether (157 including the space char). I haven't counted the letters in the ciphertext, but if there are only 105 symbols in the original text, there would not be enough repeats to form any obvious line of attack. It would all be brute force decoding based on an understanding of the encoding method. Good luck.

Re:Won't work

[creinig]

There's 105 letters in this code (upper + lower case upside down and right way up + spaces)

He also uses 3 or 4 different letter sizes. Propably only obfuscation, but you never know... (onless you solve it that is ;)

Re:Won't work

[k-rad]

Don't you think that sometime in the last 150 years since this was written that almost every person who picked it up thought the same thing? I just wonder what level of expertise has this reached? How many professional cryptographers have this on thier coffee table, or hanging on thier wall and every time they walk past it thinking 150 years, and still nothing....

Re:growing very sleepy

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah, especially when it's my first post and not yours :P

Re:OpenAL

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, why isn't it... If it reports things like Sendmail 21332180.234432 patchlevel 324324...

Re:OpenAL

[Anonymous Coward]

OpenAL is old news, there already is A3D

Re:OpenAL

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft rules!

Are the two puzzles related?

[Lionfire]

Just a thought -- perhaps the first puzzle, which was apparently reasonably easy to solve, is a clue to this second puzzle?

It could be used as a form of "key" to solve the second...


Or maybe that's just my sick twisted mind enjoying the idea of having people struggle to understand something left behind for 150 years while the clues are sitting right there on the same page :)


...MoO!

Re:OpenAL

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a (Score: -1, caffeinated offtopic troll)! Go away!

Re:OpenAL

[Anonymous Coward]

Go see it for yourself

Re:OpenAL

[Anonymous Coward]

No, I'm not a retard. This is important community news and slashdot is blatantly ignoring it. You must be a MS agent, I will kill you now. *kill*

Start with the obvious

[luckykaa]

My syntax here is "!" -> Upside down

!TIA is repeated at least twice
!A!mL is repeated at least twice
These are probably "The" and "And"

!i!rz and !irz are both in there

b, !b and K are the only symbols on their own.
Multiple representations of "I" and "A"?

Re:Start with the obvious

[Listen Up]

Things like that seem just a little too obvious. That is a good way to solve those little cryptograms in the daily newspaper. But, it is a great idea to get some thought flowing. But $2500 is a lot of money to give away if this little beauty was that easy.

Re:Start with the obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

Aside from the $2500, this is pretty far from a daily newspaper cryptogram anyway. Some thoughts: mirrored text, multiple messages, capitals of different sizes mean different things, turn it upside down and attack it. Also, on the third and fourth lines from the bottom, the letters "i", "r", and "z" are found right on top of each other, identical except for the flipped "r". That seems like more than a coincidence, but who knows?

Re:Start with the obvious

[mrfunnypants]

seems to me this would suggest a word that is three letters, except the center letter is change, anyone know of three letter words were the center letter changes and still makes sense?

Re:Start with the obvious

[luckykaa]

Don't discount the possibility that the inversion of letters is just obfuscation, or maybe it means that you should swap with another letter in the word. Tyler's First Cryptograph suggests that the writer likes scrambling as well as substitution.

Re:Start with the obvious

[theGamer]

!TIA
O!r!t
and !W!c
are all repeated twice.

as for subtile changes there's:
!dhb and dhb
!irz and !i!rz
(all lowercase, hmmm....)

I have been staring at this damn thing for an hour and it baffles me.

A few thoughts: could some of the characters be earmarks for jumping around between? Perhaps caps or upside-down indicates that the value of the letter should be added or subtracted.

Re:Start with the obvious

[Jebediah21]

It looks to me as if the case and orientation don't matter at all. I think whoever made it may have just thrown those in there to create another step or two for the solving. Not many people can read at different angles like that. Since it is english it would be intuitive to try to read it like a paragraph of prose. It has occured to me that the message may be backwards or that it could even be a "jumble" where you have to unscramble all of the words. I don't think this is the case at all. The O'rt' appears twice from my breif look, and in the same order, and there are no other 3 letter groupings with the same letters. Damn this is fun!

Re:Start with the obvious

[drnomad]

Why 'the' or 'and', why not 'Poe', it's a letter adressed to him, isn't it?

Re:Start with the obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

The string "!TIA V" is also repeated twice, intrestling enough. Another idea might be to see if the form of the text matches anything already written. For example: Dr !Lik OGXEW, could be represented by their letter count 2 3 5. The likelyhood that someone has written something that would match that pattern is quite certian, but for the whole of the text it might be worth a try. Since the last text was a quote, perhaps this one could be too. It's rather trivial and there is plent of lit. (eTexts) on the net to give it a shot. Cheers!

Re:Start with the obvious

[AndyRae]

one
ode
ole

spring to mind.

andy

A Hint:

[Anonymous Coward]

It is obviously a multiply interleaved boustrophedonic text. If you don't know what that means, you have no hope of solving it. I could probably solve the problem given a week or so of hard work, its fairly obvious just from looking at the typesetting as to how it should be solved. But alas, I don't have the time at the moment. The solution is fairly trivial.

Re:A Hint:

[Bombcar]

I have a beautiful solution for this puzzle, but this little text entry box is too small.
http://www.bombcar.com It's where it is at.

I solved it

[Anonymous Coward]

It says,

I poured hot grits down my pants while Natalie Portman was petrified and naked with ninjas and pancakes.

FIRST POST!

Way ahead of his time, Mr. Poe was.

Re:I solved it

[Anonymous Coward]

What's wrong with you moderators, that's funny as hell :D At least I laughed my ass off

Re:I solved it

[Anonymous Coward]

no no no, *I* solved it. it says:

though the panes of glass may oversee your dark and dismal days, the flightless birds of the cold, shall guide you to the stars.

thank you

Re:I solved it

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot to include ",thank you".

One addition

[Anonymous Coward]

You've forgotten to mention their refusal to run anything about OpenDK. Neglect of important community projects like these is unacceptable.

Re:One addition

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right. What should we do about this outrage? Click here for information about an international project that has been set up to deal with conspiracies like this.

Schema + Brute force algorithm

[Red Pointy Tail]

My guess is that it is a letter substitution plus translations, governed by the characteristics like Big/Small, Capital/Not, Reversed/Not.

I bet 100+ years ago they didn't have networked supercomputers like we did now, so it should be a cinch. So someone with access the juice, please key in the schema and churn

1. Define degrees of freedom schema
-----------------------------------
a) Capital or not (0,1)
b) Big, Small (0,1)
c) Reversed, or not (0,1)
d) The letter (1..26)

2. Key in the data in this schema
---------------------------------
(1,1,0,D),(1,0,0,R),spc,...

3. Run the damn thing
---------------------
Using a standard dictionary substitution methods for the letters d), using various translations for a), b) and c).

Re:Schema + Brute force algorithm

[Anonymous Coward]

Aren't some of the spaces upside down too?

Re:Schema + Brute force algorithm

[ers81239]

Another thing to consider is that Poe had to write all of the right-side-up letters first, leaving blanks for the upside-down letters. Then he had to take the paper out of the typewriter and write the upside-down letters. You can notice how he didn't quite align everything properly between the 3rd and 2nd to last letters on the second line (a small-caps u and a upside-down/backwards lower-case c).
I would vote against the guy who said to separate the letters by their type (like a 3d puzzle) because Poe wouldn't have gone to all that trouble just to have the letters be easily separated.
Wouldn't it be naughty if the orientation/case was meant to mean something like the following:

LC: leave in current position
UC: Move one space away.
SmallCap: Move two spaces away.
Orientation Normal: Move to the right.
Orientation Reversed: Move to the left.

After you do all that, then you are left with a regular cipher.

Re:Schema + Brute force algorithm

[Zarf]

This is for all the crypto-newbies out there like myself:

If we are to believe that Poe was lazy about the writing of the cipher, then we might also believe that Poe was lazy about the encryption schema aswell. In such case we may find that an successful cryptanalysis must also involve an examination of the process used to actually WRITE the cipher on a piece of paper... How would Poe have had to write this cipher down? How would he have done the type-setting?

This involves more careful thought and use of the more arcane tools of cryptanalysis. I was a big fan of Brute force until I used it to try and crack a 500 year old cipher (the Vigenere). The Kasiski test yeilded a key word of 6... the key space was 2 to the 26th... the execution time was 3 days... the result was garbage. (reason: I was using the Mutual Index of Coincidence of English to tell me if I cracked the cipher)

Perhaps my code was just buggy.

The point is: How do you Brute Force something you know nothing about... and How do you know if your answer is "Correct"?

in example Here is a cipher:

KWAKOGCMADSGJRCEANAFAESEAPVWPW

what's the decryption? Not a lot to go on is it? Perhaps Poe's cipher isn't insoluable, we just don't have enough to go on.

- // Zarf //

Re:Schema + Brute force algorithm

[jbellis]

Well, as long as we're talking brute force (and it's a pretty small text, too) you might as well simply check if some percentage of the translation is in /usr/dict/words.

Re:Schema + Brute force algorithm

[Kartoffel]

Then he had to take the paper out of the typewriter and write the upside-down letters

I thought about that too, but Poe died in 1849. There were no typewriters in 1849.

The message as we see it now came from a printing press. It's easy to manually flip the type around on a printing press.

Re:Schema + Brute force algorithm

[Anonymous Coward]

Why don't we all just attach it to our .sigs and let Echelon have a go at cracking it?
After all it is supposed to be able to content of messages without even knowing what language they are written in. Who knows, maybe Echelon will actually prove useful for something.

less than 12 Hours

[Upps]

Shouldn't be that hard to solve the puzzle. If it's not solved in 12 hours then it's a fake in my Opinion. I don't solve it but I think there are very good people out there on the net with a lot of time for such games.

Re:less than 12 Hours

[byoon]

You seem awfully confident. Remember, this has sat around for 150 years unsolved and I doubt it's just some simple substitution or even a Vignere cipher.

For instance, Poe/Tyler could have used any piece of writing as a key so unless you have a perl script that does a word by word analysis of every bit of published writing from Poe's time, you could be in for a long haul.

Check out The Code Book by Simon Singh. He talks
about a piece of code that supposedly leads to several million dollars worth of gold buried in the hills of western Virginia that has never been solved despite the efforts of 1000's of people.
A human being who wants to keep something secret from computer analysis probably can, as long as they don't want anyone else to read it either. You can use several different keys, each being a very obscure text, for instance.

Of course, I could be wrong. This could be a very simple cipher, but something tells me it probably isn't.

Some things just aren't solvable.

[Anonymous Coward]

For example, if I defined the letter A to mean "Please Patiently Ponder Purported Poe Puzzle", you'd have no way of telling what the encrypted code A means unless I told you. The cryptographic method might not be that strong, but there just isn't enough data to be decrypted. I wouldn't waste my time with this.

Re:Some things just aren't solvable.

[WigginX]

You have a point, but what we have here is a prime example of the difference between a code and a cipher. Defining "A" to mean "Please Patiently Ponder Purported Poe Puzzle" is an example of encoding. The only way to solve a true code without any starting information is by statistical analysis of the content, which in this case we do not have. Naturally, with this method more content provides better statistical analysis with a greater likelihood of revealing the correct solution.

Because we have a relatively small amount of content to decrypt and no piece of the code already revealed as a starting point, we should assume that this puzzle is encrypted with some sort of cipher, which automatically means that it is able to be decrytped rather easily once the pattern of the cipher has been determined.

Re:I solved it - please moderate to funny

[Anonymous Coward]

Please moderate that one to funny, it's a killer :)

Just a thought...

[Nastard]

If some Slashdot reader happens to solve this, why not donate some of that money to the OSS community? Or at least to projects that support strong cryptography :P

Reversals are probably capitals (or red herrings)

[Red Pointy Tail]

Look at the occurence B and !B (! is reversal, both small size)

... probably a and A.

I think it is a direct mapping, i.e. If X -> A then X! -> a or if X -> a then X! -> A.

If you look, you will see all the Bs occuring in midword (where it can't possibly be capital) is B and not B!.

Now lets figure out what big/small, capital/small means....

Re:Reversals are probably capitals (or red herring

[Red Pointy Tail]

whoops, wouldn't work.

i!Rz and iRz are both on. back to the drawing board....

Diophantus' Arithmetica

[Yardley]

I have assuredly found an admirable resolution to this, but the margin is too narrow to contain it.

And perhaps, posterity will thank me for having shown it that the ancients did not know everything.

Troll, but funny!

[Dacta]

Someone had moderated it as "Interesting"! That is pretty funny.

Re:Troll, but funny!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why are the trolls moderated as interesting and the funny as trolls and interesting as offtopic?
Because the moderators are on crack.

Re:Troll, but funny!

[-brazil-]

No, simply because it's often difficult to tell a good troll from someone who's serious, and of course one's person't funniest joke ever is another's yawn.

Re:Troll, but funny!

[Anonymous Coward]

No, simply because it's often difficult to tell a good troll from someone who's serious..
Yeah, well I was serious. Go look up "boustrophedon" at britannica.com if you think I just made it up. Poe was a clever bastard, and his text obviously contains clues to its own solution as a means to humiliate the solver so they'd see how OBVIOUS the clues were once it was solved. Remember, this was Poe's Parthian shot.
The text runs in two directions, suggesting the regular characters are one text stream, and the upside-down characters are running back the other direction, interleaved with each other. Each type font (upper case, lower case, and small caps, plus inversions) could be a separate text stream, possibly there are 6 different interleaved streams, running in boustrophedonic fashion. I could work it out by brute force, but I don't have time. Good crypto cracking takes time, time I haven't got.
So go ahead and label it a troll, it only shows your own ignorance. Maybe if you'd taken a few liberal arts and humanities courses in college, you'd know about this stuff.

Re:OpenAL - moderate up!

[Anonymous Coward]

Please moderate this to (Score: 2, Interesting)! It's offtopic but this guy has a point!

That would be cute...

[Denny]

...and although I wouldn't want to call Poe 'twisted' as such, he was definitely, well, shall we say 'interesting' ? :)

Regards,
Denny

# Using Linux in the UK? Check out Linux UK

Re:That would be cute...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Using Linux in the UK? Check out Linux UK"

Interesting design, wonder where you got the idea from ;) sorry had to test

Re:That would be cute...

[Denny]

Linux UK runs on PHPSlash, which is a PHP port of the Slash engine that this site runs on... hence the similar look and feel...

Hopefully, as time progresses, Linux UK will move away from looking like 'Yet Another Slashdot Clone' and gain its own identity...

Regards,
Denny

# Using Linux in the UK? Check out Linux UK

More Poe fun

[Restil]

Although this isn't completely on topic, you might want to check out http://members.aol.com/s6sj7gt/mikerav.htm

This is a transformation of the poem "The Raven" converted so the number of letters in each word match the digits in PI. Talk about people with too much time on their hands. :)

-Restil

The puzzle and A solution?

[doomy]

Maybe we are looking at the puzzle in the wrong way. I've been doing a lot of 3d work lately and the first time I saw this puzzle, I felt that it had something to do with a depth.

Look at how some letters extrude out and some go in and some lie in most unusual manner. Also see the cases. There are fonts uses of varying sizes. This gives a very strong feel for depth. The first two letters. Cap D and R with the R being half the size of D, pushing it in. Then the mix of cases and the big OGXEW right up front.

If someone could lay this puzzle in a 3d representation, I'm pretty sure we a solution would open up.
--

Re:The puzzle and A solution?

[CausticPuppy]

That's always a possibility, but in order to encode a puzzle in such a manner, the author would have to have a pretty good understanding of 3D perception and transformation, right?
The question is: would an accomplished LITERARY genius necessarily have good spacial comprehension? If so, then it would be a trait nobody had known about until now.
If not, maybe the puzzle is an attempt at 3D encoding, but not a very good one, so it would be easy to crack. Or utterly impossible if he didn't do it right!

Re:The puzzle and A solution?

[JonesBoy]

Would a LITERARY genius necessarily have good spacial comprehension???? Hell yes! Pull two or three pages out of a book and hold them up to a light. You now have letters in different orientations and depth. It would not be easy to crack because the words are intertwined in each other. There is no letter to letter correlation, which is what was hinted to in the last puzzle. This may be a step in the right direction.

Re:The puzzle and A solution?

[CausticPuppy]

Hold 3 pages up to a light, you now have letters in different orientations... but not depth, unless you're using really thick paper. The three sheets will just appear superimposed but it would be very difficult to tell which one was in back, in the middle, or in front.
I didn't say that this WASN'T a possible explanation, just not likely, since I don't think Poe was reknowned for his ability to think spatially (assuming he was the author?). Maybe he could, but he just wasn't known for that specifically.
It seems to me that there would be a more "algorithmic" solution...

Re:The puzzle and A solution?

[TheJet]

Two thoughts on this...

First, what if you write the whole thing around a rectangular rod (i.e. elongated cube): Take each four-letter combination and write it vertically, then match up the vertical sections, then look at each section and rewrite it in whatever direction makes the text readable. This could then be encrypted using standard replacement techniques. Has anyone done a count on whether each type of character has the same number of occurrences in the cipher??

Second, I had flashbacks of an old 3-2-1-Contact episode where they wrote a code around a broomstick, i.e. wrap the paper around a broomstick, then write the message across it, then unravel the paper and transcribe the character pattern. Then you tell your friend how far apart the letters should be and what size broomstick you used and they can decode the message by reversing what you did...

Just my 2c
The "Top 10" Reasons to procrastinate:

Re:The puzzle and A solution?

[Derek Pomery]

Wrapping the message around a rod, then filling in the spaces with gibberish is an old technique (seem to remember a reference to roman use?).
Unfortunately, it amounts to reading with a fixed interval between. This often makes the message jump out at the reader, even with large intervals.
At the very least, anyone who suspects you have done this will solve the message in a very short period of time.
If they didn't suspect, it might take longer to do the frequency count.

Re:The puzzle and A solution?

[lar]

would an accomplished LITERARY genius necessarily have good spacial comprehension?

Forgive me if I read this wrong, but it sounds to me that you think Poe's spatial comprehension abilities may be lacking because he's a litereary (read: artsy) genius? If I am reading it right, I assume this is being presumed because of the whole left-brain/right-brain thing. Forgive me if I'm wrong.

I think this must be said. Poe is a literary genius, granted. But Poe was also highly intelligent when it came to logic and such (I'd be willing to bet he was very good at math). Poe is credited with having invented the modern detective story with either "Murders in the Rue Morgue" or "The Purloined Letter" (I can't remember which, but I highly recommend both--"Murders in the Rue Morgue" is actually one of my favorite stories). "The Gold Bug" is another example of Poe's highly analytical mind.

I'm not sure if you did mean to say in your post that Poe might not have had great "left-brain" skills because he was an artist, but, if you did, I think you were doing him a great disservice. Poe had an excellent analytical, "left-brained" mind. Just read "Murders in the Rue Morgue" if you don't believe me.

In fact, just read "Murders in the Rue Morgue". You'll thank me for it later.

==

Insideoutsiders

[absurd]

And everyone is automatically assuming it is written in english. Oh my, oh my.

Well that is what you get being all alone out there far away all by yourself and so on...

Re:Insideoutsiders

[Anonymous Coward]

No, really. How do you know it's in english? I mean, didn't Poe know any other languages? How do you know it's English and not a language of his own, for that matter?

Re:Insideoutsiders

[cpt kangarooski]

Poe was good at Latin, and I would expect that he knew French as well.

Solved

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a message from their server saying 'Please don't /. me'

Re:Solved

[Black Parrot]

It's the results of this year's obfuscated C code contest.

It's a UU-encoded pic of Mrs. Poe.

It's the vendor key track off the DVD of Poe's first movie.

It's a stolen copy of my first Latin homework assignment. (As you can see, I didn't do very well on it.)

It's a ruse to distract the predecessor of the NSA from the real secret messages, his poetry.

It's the Universal Turing Machine's representation of itself.

It's the transcript of a Ravenish poem about a human who sits on the bookcase and keeps saying "moreover". (That explains the repeats.)

It's a plot summary for the entire X-Files series. (Actually that's just a WAG, based on the fact that they make equal sense to me.)

It's Mr. Poe's public key, used as a .sig to the other cryptogram.

It's the message those two famous Byzantine generals kept sending back and forth.

It's what he got when he happened to write more /dev/inkpot with his quill.

It's the way everyone used to write, before the bookmaking cartel decommoditized the protocol.

--

Sounds like something for the NSA

[Raindeer]

The NSA seems to be a great place to help with this. Great PR-stunt for them too. And since they cost a ton of money a year it might be nice to see that they actually do have the power to solve this. In the end this doesn't come down to the money but to the honour of being the first.

Re:Sounds like something for the NSA

[B. Samedi]

I can just see some bored NSA math prodigy now. "God, it's a boring day. Hey, what's this on Salon? Well hell, that supercomputer isn't doing much right now and I could use $2500 bucks...,"

Here is the REAL 19th Century Code Challenge...

[cybrpnk]

Poe IS cool but the REAL 19th century code mystery is called the Beale cypher. This guy sent the letter below and three code sheets to a friend. Beale's codes were based on documents available in the early 1800s - one was the Declaration of Independence. One code sheet talked about a vault of gold in Bedford County (Virginia, I think) when decoded, and the second listed who got what share of it (not reproduced here). The final code sheet with the gold's location, reproduced below, HAS NEVER BEEN BROKEN....

Details at:

http://treasurehunt.miningco.com/hobbies/treasur ehunt/bllet.htm

The Original Uncoded Letter From Beale

St. Louis, Mo., May 9th, 1822.

Robt. Morris, Esq.:

My Esteemed Friend: - Ever since leaving my comfortable quarters at your house I have been journeying to this place, and only succeeded in reaching it yesterday. I have had altogether a pleasant time, the weather being fine and the atmosphere bracing. I shall remain here a week or ten days longer, then "ho" for the plains, to hunt the buffalo and encounter the savage grizzlies. How long I may be absent I cannot now determine, certainly no less than two years, perhaps longer.

With regard to the box left in your charge, I have a few words to say, and, if you will permit me, give you some instructions concerning it. It contains papers vitally affecting the fortunes of myself and many others engaged in business with me, and in the event of my death, its loss might be irreparable. You will, therefore, see the necessity of guarding it with vigilance and care to prevent so great a catastrophe. It also contains some letters addressed to yourself, and which will be necessary to enlighten you concerning the business in which we are engaged. Should none of us ever return you will please preserve carefully the box for the period of ten years from the date of this letter, and if I, or no one with authority from me during that time demands its restoration, you will open it, which can be done by removing the lock. You will find, in addition to the papers addressed to you, other papers which will be unintelligible without the aid of a key to assist you. Such a key I have left in the hands of a friend in this place, sealed, addressed to yourself, and endorsed not to be delivered until June, 1832. By means of this you will understand fully all you will be required to do.

I know you will cheerfully comply with my request, thus adding to the many obligations under which you have already placed me. In the meantime, should death or sickness happen to you, to which all are liable, please select from among your friends some one worthy, and to him hand this letter, and to him delegate your authority. I have been thus particular in my instructions, in consequence of the somewhat perilous enterprise in which we are engaged, but trust we shall meet long ere the time expires, and so save you this trouble. Be the result what it may, however, the game is worth the candle, and we will play it to the end. With kindest wishes for your most excellent wife, compliments to the ladies, a good word to enquiring friends, if there be any, and assurances of my highest esteem for yourself, I remain as ever,

Your sincere friend, T.J.B.

Beale Code Page II - (This is the decrypt; the original is on the web page above)

I have deposited in the county of Bedford, about four miles from Buford's, in an excavation or vault, six feet below the surface of the ground, the following articles, belonging jointly to the parties whose names are given in number "3," herewith:

The first deposit consisted of one thousand and fourteen pounds of gold, and three thousand eight hundred and twelve pounds of silver, deposited November, 1819. The second was made December, 1821, and consisted of nineteen hundred and seven pounds of gold, and twelve hundred and eighty-eight pounds of silver; also jewels, obtained in St. Louis in exchange for silver to save transportation, and valued at $13,000.

The above is securely packed in iron pots, with iron covers. The vault is roughly lined with stone, and the vessels rest on solid stone, and are covered with others. Paper number "1" describes the exact locality of the vault so that no difficulty will be had in finding it.

THE LOCALITY OF THE VAULT - (This has never been decoded)

71,194,38,1701,89,76,11,83,1629,48,94,63,132,16, 111,95,84,341.
975,14,40,64,27,81,139,213,63,90,1120,8,15,3,126 ,2018,40,74.
758,485,604,230,436,664,582,150,251,284,308,231, 124,211,486,225.
401,370,11,101,305,139,189,17,33,88,208,193,145, 1,94,73,416.
918,263,28,500,538,356,117,136,219,27,176,130,10 ,460,25,485,18.
436,65,84,200,283,118,320,138,36,416,280,15,71,2 24,961,44,16,401.
39,88,61,304,12,21,24,283,134,92,63,246,486,682, 7,219,184,360,780.
18,64,463,474,131,160,79,73,440,95,18,64,581,34, 69,128,367,460,17.
81,12,103,820,62,116,97,103,862,70,60,1317,471,5 40,208,121,890.
346,36,150,59,568,614,13,120,63,219,812,2160,178 0,99,35,18,21,136.
872,15,28,170,88,4,30,44,112,18,147,436,195,320, 37,122,113,6,140.
8,120,305,42,58,461,44,106,301,13,408,680,93,86, 116,530,82,568,9.
102,38,416,89,71,216,728,965,818,2,38,121,195,14 ,326,148,234,18.
55,131,234,361,824,5,81,623,48,961,19,26,33,10,1 101,365,92,88,181.
275,346,201,206,86,36,219,324,829,840,64,326,19, 48,122,85,216,284.
919,861,326,985,233,64,68,232,431,960,50,29,81,2 16,321,603,14,612.
81,360,36,51,62,194,78,60,200,314,676,112,4,28,1 8,61,136,247,819.
921,1060,464,895,10,6,66,119,38,41,49,602,423,96 2,302,294,875,78.
14,23,111,109,62,31,501,823,216,280,34,24,150,10 00,162,286,19,21.
17,340,19,242,31,86,234,140,607,115,33,191,67,10 4,86,52,88,16,80.
121,67,95,122,216,548,96,11,201,77,364,218,65,66 7,890,236,154,211.
10,98,34,119,56,216,119,71,218,1164,1496,1817,51 ,39,210,36,3,19.
540,232,22,141,617,84,290,80,46,207,411,150,29,3 8,46,172,85,194.
39,261,543,897,624,18,212,416,127,931,19,4,63,96 ,12,101,418,16,140.
230,460,538,19,27,88,612,1431,90,716,275,74,83,1 1,426,89,72,84.
1300,1706,814,221,132,40,102,34,868,975,1101,84, 16,79,23,16,81,122.
324,403,912,227,936,447,55,86,34,43,212,107,96,3 14,264,1065,323.
428,601,203,124,95,216,814,2906,654,820,2,301,11 2,176,213,71,87,96.
202,35,10,2,41,17,84,221,736,820,214,11,60,760.

Re:Here is the REAL 19th Century Code Challenge...

[timothy]

Like this maybe-Poe cryptograph, though, the Beale has also never been solved, or at least not provably so. Some hunters have said that they located the destination (claiming this or that cave, well, hollow under West-Virginian bar, etc.).

The most convincing report I've heard says that the Beale cipher was intentionally broken. That is, the first two sheets *were* soluble, with some work, but that's only a tease to make the 3rd one that much more frustrating.

And since I haven't solved it, I'm inclined to bitterly agree.:)

Re:Here is the REAL 19th Century Code Challenge...

[Mendax Veritas]

But if you solved the Beale cipher, would you announce the solution or just go get the gold and keep quiet about it?

Re:OpenAL

[Mawbid]

The post I'm replying to started at 0 and went down to -1 because it said "Why isn't slashdot running a story on OpenAL? Is this a MS conspiracy?"

However, I checked out the link to OpenAL. It looks interesting. Excerpts:

OpenAL, the Open Audio Library, seeks to become the audio counterpart to OpenGL for audio. With OpenAL it is possible to create three-dimensional sound across many platforms, such as Linux, Apple Macintosh, Windows and more, with quality suitable for professional projects like games and multimedia applications.

and

OpenAL is being sponsored by commercial software and hardware companies to help make open source work. Here is a current list of the member and partner companies:

• Creative Labs
• Loki Entertainment Software

But you gotta wonder if these people are serious whan they name part of their library "Al-Core".

This certainly is offtopic here, but in case the AC is right and Slashdot is not posting this for some sinister reason, I figured I'd make it seen using my +1 bonus.

Still, there's no reason to assume the worst; we don't even know if this has been submitted as a story, so don't call me a paranoid conspiracy theorist or anything :-)
--

Mixup with another story

[Ed Avis]

I read Slashdot with several stories in different windows. When I switched to this one, I got it confused with the previous story's comments.

That must be the answer. The puzzle is an example sendmail.cf.

OT and old,

[Anonymous Coward]

You've prabably seen this before, but for the two of you who haven't seen what Poe would have written if he had Access to MS-DOS check this out

The word encryption has implications

[reality-bytes]

To encyrpt implies the possibility of decryption; unless this guy new that over a hundred years later, several thousand idiots would still be trying to solve that which never meant anything ;)

It must be...

[Megane]

...37734 5P33|!!! So all we need is to get a skr1pt k1dd33 to decode it for us!

One Starting Place

[paulywog]

Since I'll probably not spend much time working on this myself (don't want to get fired from my real job that pays the bills), I'll throw out my first thoughts about the cryp.

Perhaps the most obvious observation is that there are really four different sets of characters in the message:
right-side-up UPPER CASE
right-side-up lower case
up-side-down UPPER CASE
up-side-down lower case

If the message isn't obsenely difficult to decode (as with the first message) then there are probably simply four different sets of rules to use with each of the four character types.

A starting place might be to begin with shorter words or common repetitions of characters and begin there.

Simple character replacement isn't all that difficult to decode, but character replacement when you've got 4 times as many encodings could be much more difficult. For instance, the upside "R" and "q" and rightside up "l" and "B" could all be the same letter for instance, making it nearly impossible to identify patterns or repeting characters. Someone want to make some estimates as to the total number of possible encodings?

Is it (26!)^4 or something crazy like that?

(26!)^4 = 2.65 x 10^106

Re:One Starting Place

[Arnaud]

Perhaps the most obvious observation is that there are really four different sets of characters in the message:
right-side-up UPPER CASE
right-side-up lower case
up-side-down UPPER CASE
up-side-down lower case

Actually there are more letters than that:
I presume that with upside down you mean rotated 180 degrees. So that leaves us with:
-The four you mention
-small UPPERCASE
-Also possible is upside down

This last one is especially sneaky with symmetric letters, but you may notice that in for example in the letter A the right leg is thicker than the left leg. I haven't found any upside down letters that are non symmetric, but there are some A's that could be upside down

On a different note, what also strikes me is that only capitols (small and large) are used in the To Edgar part. Maybe this is a clue?

Grt,
Arnaud.

Re:One Starting Place

[Basje]

On a different note, what also strikes me is that only capitols (small and large) are used in the To Edgar part. Maybe this is a clue?


I suspect that the author started coding using uppercase letters first, and when he ran out of uppercase he switched to lowercase or smallcaps.

Maybe we can indeed use it.

Furthermore I propose, should we solve this thing together here, to donate the $2500 to the Gutenberg project. It only seems fitting.

----------------------------------------------

Come on!

[Mawbid]

Flamebait?!
--

Surely Poe wasn't a script kiddie...

[kasparov]

But he certainly looks like he's trying to be 31337 here...

Eureka

[EricWright]

I have discovered a truly remarkable solution to this cypher which, unfortunately, is too large to fit in the available bandwidth to this server...

New legal dispute coming up!

[viktor]

Hey! Look at that poe cipher, row 7 from the bottom, slightly right of the middle. It says 'eToY'!

Darn. Just as one dispute was settled, the next begins. Now etoys.com will have to sue Poe postumly for using something that almost looks like their company name... :)

Cryptography: just add water

[ragnar]

Could it be that the reason this cryptograph has remained unsolved for so long is that it is actually insoluble?

But of course! The molecular structure of a cryptogram is polar, meaning that it is insoluable in water. However, if you stir it up enough, it might look like it dissoved.

Of course, that still doesn't mean it insolvable. ;)

Re:Cryptography: just add water

[Remote]

The molecular structure of a cryptogram is polar, meaning that it is insoluable in water.

Humm... Doesn't it work the other way?

Good fellow ...

[Nicolas MONNET]

Since you haven't solved anything ... why don't YOU give some money to the OSS community?

At least, he who will solve it will deserve it ...

Re:Good fellow ...

[Anonymous Coward]

i took the purity test from your sig

im 36% corrupt :( please god get me the hell out of here

Re:OpenAL

[GregWebb]

That last paragraph is the thing to remember, certainly.

But you got moderated down to Flamebait for saying THAT?

Wow, I hope this one comes up in my M2.

Greg

Er this should be moderated up....

[dr_labrat]

Dudes, this man has something to say. And he could be onto something...

Against censorship by stupid moderation

[Nicolas MONNET]

I repost the appropriate, learnèd and interesting post from our fellow A.C. I'll probably get moderated down, but anyway.

A Hint:

It is obviously a multiply interleaved boustrophe donic text. If you don't know what that means, you have no hope of solving it. I could probably solve the problem given a week or so of hard work, its fairly obvious just from looking at the typesetting as to how it should be solved. But alas, I don't have the time at the moment. The solution is fairly trivial.

I *KNOW* what it is!!!! You owe me $1500!!!

[Nicolas MONNET]

It's Textmode Quake running on Ada Lovelace's mechanical computer! I remember reading on freshmeat last century that aalib had been ported to it!

Did anyone notice...

[FirstEdition]

Did anyone notice that the smaller, broken cypher was encoded using alphabetic substitution, but each word was reversed.

"....Another clue was taken from Tyler's correspondence to Poe in which he discussed the difficulty of deciphering text that was written backwards ("eht", rather than "the"), and spaces and punctuation are omitted."

We should not rule this out when/if attempting a brute force dictionary attack.

Secondly, all symbols in use seem to be in one of 8 alphabets:

* upper/lower case
* small/normal size
* right/upside down

What about reading off the characters in each of the alphabets, (ignoring spaces & other alphabets), to create a stream of "normalised" characters. ie. start reading all upper/small/right, then upper/small/upsidedown, etc. From there, attack the concatenated stream as an alphabetic substitution cypher, allowing reversed words.

Of course, we don't know which order to do the alphabets in.

Hmmm. in the best Bletchley Park tradition, we could run all arrangements of 8 character streams in parallel.

Re:Did anyone notice...

[vjzuylen]

I tried seperating the alphabets, but it's very difficult because certain characters are impossible to tell apart from eachother. For instance, the lowercase 'c', 'o', 's', 'v', 'w', 'x' and 'z' are almost identical to their smallcaps counterparts.

Also, the aligment of the alphabets on certain lines makes it extremely hard to tell what alphabet a letter belongs to. For instance, try to separate the lowercase 'b' from upside-down lowercase 'q', lowercase 'd' from upside-down lowercase 'p', lowercase 'n' from upside-down lowercase 'u', lowercase and smallcaps 'o' from upside-down lowercase and upside-down smallcaps 'o', lowercase and smallcaps 'x' from upside-down lowercase and upside-down smallcaps 'x', and lowercase and smallcaps 'x' from upside-down lowercase and upside-down smallcaps 'z'.

Poe must have known this would be a problem when he constructed the puzzle. Perhaps ambiguous characters default to a certain alphabet, or form an alphabet by themselves?

Re:Did anyone notice...

[cybe]

What about reading off the characters in each of the alphabets, (ignoring spaces & other alphabets), to create a stream of "normalised" characters. ie. start reading all upper/small/right, then upper/small/upsidedown, etc. From there, attack the concatenated stream as an alphabetic substitution cypher, allowing reversed words.

Then look at the first 23 big capitals. The same letter is not used twice, all letters but J, R and Z are used once.

That speaks against a regular substitution encryption, unless the plaintext is written specifically for equal distribution of letters..

Just my $0.02

Re:Did anyone notice...

[gotan]

While small Caps/lowercase are still undistinguishable upside down characters are aligned a little lower than 'normal' characters (even small ones) so they can be distinguished with a ruler. I think though that Poe thought about this and used ambigous characters only for one meaning. For example i didn't see an upside down 'x' in the text, but i did find small caps 'T' and 't' (even next to one another). I did some counting and believe (as some others here) that it's a polyalphabetic ciphre, maybe with some added difficulties, since in the letters i counted (only large upside) none stood out being used particular often and most were used about 9 times throughout the text.

Second Cryptograph

[HedsSpaz]

So, has anyone tried compiling it yet? Heh heh... ;)

Can the different letters be separate lines?

[Chacham]

If there are so many alphabets, maybe they all map to the same letters, but should be translated one after the other.

What are the frequencies in each alphabet?

----------------

Eruditorum Challenge

[Kazparr]

Another crypto inspired author and slashdot favorite, Neal 'Cryptonomicon' Stephenson, has his own
crypto challenge.
It is certain to be harder than this one.

I wasted half a day, and have since given up.

Mind you the Poe cypher has been around 150 years, Stephenson's Eruditorum challenge has resisted solution for 1 (and counting.)

Good Luck!

Re:Eruditorum Challenge

[LocalH]

I know this is offtopic here, but I looked at it and at first glance, it looks like hex to me. It's a 22x22 matrix of characters ranging from 0-6 and b-f, 12 characters in all. This falls within the definition of hex. I haven't done much analysis yet, but it looks to me to be converted to hex after being created in either decimal or binary (or I could be completely way off base).
_______
Scott Jones
Newscast Director / ABC19 WKPT
Commodore 64 Democoder

Re:Eruditorum Challenge

[Remote]

No, this site (www.eruditorum.org) has nothing to do with Neal Stephenson. It was registered by someone who doesn't know what to do with the domain name. I can't find the link now, but a couple of months ago I read that he registered the domain right after reading the book, which seemed to him to be a good idea, but then the fellow decided to sell it. I don't know if he still owns it, or if the current owner bought it from him.

By the way, that crypto challenge you mention has already been broken, as one can read in the very same page your link leads to.

Re:Eruditorum Challenge

[Dossy]

crypto challenge ... Mind you the Poe cypher has been around 150 years, Stephenson's Eruditorum challenge has resisted solution for 1 (and counting.)

Hi, did you actually *check* that page recently?

I mean, scroll to the bottom of it, and read it?

Congratulations to micahj@io.com for being the first person to identify the source of the ciphertext.

So, Tyler/Poe's cypher is still the one to break. :-)

Re:Eruditorum Challenge

[B. Samedi]

Noooo. Read the page (and your own post). Micahj@io.com has only identified the source of the ciphertext. This is like knowing what the message was encoded in not what the text says. Pay more attention.

Well of course it's soluble!

[snicker]

I bet given time we could come up with marginally reasonable algorithms to transform the cypher into, say, the receipt for Toklas Brownies , the Book of the Subgenius, my home phone number... after all, it could be compressed as well as encrypted. Without any idea of what the plaintext could even BE (what language? what alphabet?) how can we expect to know we have the right answer when we get one?

Now there's an idea for an encryption algorithm, one that yields a false plaintext if an incorrect key is used...

Hey, and does anyone care about Negroponte's challenge from the Being Digital hardcover? (Oooh triple encrypted! It's probably just "Yay! Digital!" over and over...)

yeah, ok. back to work
*snicker

Re:Well of course it's soluble!

[DerMarlboro]

Well of course it's soluble! I bet given time we could come up with marginally reasonable algorithms to transform the cypher into, say, the receipt for Toklas Brownies , the Book of the Subgenius, my home phone number... after all, it could be compressed as well as encrypted. Without any idea of what the plaintext could even BE (what language? what alphabet?) how can we expect to know we have the right answer when we get one?


It's not quite so easy as that, I'm afraid. Sure, you can make the cyphertext come out to any plaintext you like if you use the algorythm and key. For example, say we assume its simple alphabetic rotation based on a key that happens to be exactly as long as the message itself. Then we can make the message say anything by simply rotating each letter so as to give us the intended result.

But the key would probably wind up looking pretty random. The real breathroughs in cryptanalysis come from order and repetition. In the case of a rotation based on a message-length key, we could come up with any number of keys that produce intelligible plaintext, but you'll probably find only one key that both makes sense itself, and produces a sensible plaintext.

Take, for example, the cyphertext:

uomgcqxhrfpzmlguyxk

Well, if we use the key:

coyzjudvutugqwrzgoo

We get a plaintext of:

iamthegodofhellfire

Which makes sense, but its probably not the right answer because the key is totally random. But if we use the key:

natalieportmanrules

and apply it to the cyphertext, we get

hotgritsdownmypants

Since both the key and the cyphertext make sense, this is probably the correct decypherment.

This is just one example, but that's the general idea behind deciding whether or not you're going down the wrong path in decyphering a message.

The Gold Bug Variations

[lbjay]

This reminds me of a really excellent book I read last year called The Gold Bug Variations , by Richard Powers. Great geek literature involving genetic coding, Darwinian theory, art history, programming, classical music and the "science of love."

Hey! Someone else who's read it and likes to write book reviews (not me) should submit it to Slashdot.

Sorry for the amazon URL. I only buy computer books online, so I wasn't sure what other site was more acceptable to link to.

Spacing

[Spigot]

I find the spacing of the puzzle intriguing. Why aren't all the "words" spaced evenly. The left hand side of the bottom few lines are especially spaced differently. Are there two spaces between some of the letters, or is that just a result of his having to turn the paper over to type the upside down letters? Could this mean that 'space' is actually another letter?

Re:Spacing

[Anonymous Coward]

Why aren't all the "words" spaced evenly.

because the text is typeset and center-justified, just like most newspapers. Notice how the text touches each margin line.

Re:Spacing

[lar]

if that's the case (which seems very likely to me) then that means that it isn't the spacing that's important, but the lines. It looks to me like some lines could fit another word or two on them, but instead they're widely spaced, letting the word go to the next line.

Of course, I could be on crack and just be seeing things wrong. I'm not positive that some lines can fit anymore words on them.

==

Re:Spacing

[Anonymous Coward]

It looks to me like some lines could fit another word or two on them, but instead they're widely spaced, letting the word go to the next line.

But then again, you're not trying to fit these words in using little blocks of lead with letters on them :)

INNCPPE (I'm no nineteenth century printing press expert) but I'd assume that the cryptogram was written out on paper and then given to a typesetter to be printed in the newspaper. The typesetter has restrictions on how wide the column is, so he lays out as many words as he can physically fit in the row, and then does the center-justification by eyeball. This could be used as an argument that the word separations are significant, but I'm not totally sold on that.

It does appear that the spacing becomes more generous towards the end, but this could be a simple matter that the typesetter had a certain amount of vertical space to fill.

It would be nice to be able to see the whole page that the cyrptogram is excerpted from to get some idea of context.

is it just me ...

[Anonymous Coward]

or does this look like Befunge to anybody else?

Re:is it just me ...

[Anonymous Coward]

you are not the only one... heh.

What literary genius?

[Bastian]

We don't know who made these ciphers, there's no good reason to assume that the person who wrote them was into literature at all, let alone whether he or she was a literary genius and least of all whether it was Poe or not.

Another point of obfuscation...

[Morbid Curiosity]

...for those who haven't looked at the other, solved cipher (known plaintext makes it a lot easier, of course...) I've been reminded of something else you can do with your code to make it difficult to break - spelling mistakes don't obfuscate the plaintext very much, but can really confound attempts at decryption without keys.

The plaintext for the first few lines reads as follows:

``The soul secure in her existence smil at the drawn dagger and defies ints point the stars shall fade away the sun himoelf grow dim with age anh nature...''

A couple of the 'e's there are periods, whilst the rest are commas. Just to put a bit more of a spin on the problem...

don't whine...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah well. Flamebait, offtopic, whatever.
I just moderated you down.
I am the Chaotic Moderator From Hell,
don't take it personal. Just felt like I wanted
to do something mean.

By the way, cool project, OpenAL !

Ignore the spaces?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe the spaces are just there to confuse the person trying to decrypt it. Leaving out the spaces would make it harder to solve the puzzle, but putting them in the wrong place would make it even harder.

Secret code on wall at CIA or NSA

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone remember the article on a crytograph on the wall out from of the CIA or NSA. Can someone point me to a link there. All this cryto talk has my creative juices flowing...

Re:Secret code on wall at CIA or NSA

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a sculpture at the NSA's main building. Try their main page.

reversed words....no

[Ilciclone]

Given that letter substitition is beeing used, I think we can rule out that the words are written backwards. I base this in the fact that at the end of line 10 in the crypto is the word "RVV" (in small capitals).. This could probably translate to "see" or "all" or something like that.. If this was a word written backwards, that would mean that the word would start with two of the same letters.. And I don't know of any such word in english (or in any other language)

Isn't it logical??

Re:reversed words....no

[B-Rad]

eel
llama
aardvark

Re:reversed words....no

[Ilciclone]

you're right.. atleast eel would fit in.. That means it can't be ruled out that the words are written backwards. It's just quite unlikely.

Re:reversed words....no

[Don Sample]

Since this hasn't been solved yet I would be greatly surprised if how you translate a cyphertext character to its plaintext equivalent is a simple X --> Y transformation.

There may be things such as character position dependancies so the two "V" characters translate into different characters in the plaintext version.

Or maybe it's a number.

Re:reversed words....no

[osok]

I think the rvv word has a different v's one normal and one small capital v. look closely.

He was a programmer!

[sqrlbait5]

I've seen CS professors write less clear code than that.


The crypto thingy looks like it's in good ol' scary Perl anyways...I'd compile it but I'm no good at anything but assembly anymore...damn cprE classes.

Re: My lord, it is about Ninjas! LOOK!

[Sotaku]

After close examination of the piece, I noticed something. The 9th Row, the 4th word from the left indeed does say Ninja! And one word over says "diky"! In theory, this unknown word may be part of a "secret ninja code language", and this word may just happen to mean: "Pancake" in that "secret ninja code language"! Oh this is a glorious day!

Thank you Mr Poe!
Sotaku

Just ONE little question...

[jabber]

If we manage to 'solve' the puzzle, how will we know that our solution is correct?

Re:Just ONE little question...

[Zurk]

thats easy - it will be either a paragraph from a known work or a poe story/poem/whatever or a simple letter from poe. these problems are all self answering - a lot of mathematics problems are the same. if you have the answer, you *know* its the right one.

Another possibility

[kill -9 $$]

Anybody ever consider the posibility of another language being in use here. Who said the intended message is in modern English? I guess this is a debate better left to someone with a better Literature and History person to validate this (if in fact it was done by Poe), but I wouldn't discount it.

I intend to look at this in detail later. Don't expect to crack it, but its fun to spin the wheels ocassionally. (maybe it'll move me towards a career with the NSA or CIA) :-)

Explain the first cryptograph to me?

[Brian Kendig]

I'm looking at the first cryptograph and its solution on "http://www.bokler.com/eapoe.html", but I don't see a one-to-one correspondance between the symbols in the cryptograph and the letters in the solution. For example, if spaces aren't represented in the code and the first few characters are "THESOULSEC", then a comma stands for a 'T' the first time and an 'S' the second time.

Would someone please explain the key to this cryptograph? Is it one-to-one, or something more complex?

Re:Explain the first cryptograph to me?

[ers81239]

The words are written backwards, but you still start the message in the upper-left hand corner. There is no word-delimiting symbol.

Re:Explain the first cryptograph to me?

[threaded]

It's a little more complex. The words are backwards and there are spelling mistakes.

Boustrophedonic

[Anonymous Coward]

So, I decided to try this idea out. With no clues to go by, I've picked large uppercase rightside up as the starting point, since the first letter is D. Then I read them across right, all uppercase rightside up, then back to the left, all uppercase upside down. Then repeat with smallcaps and then lower case.

The problem I'm running into is distinguishing between ambiguous characters. For example, on the 2nd line there are numerous 's' characters that could be either small caps or lowercase, and also upside down or right side up. I have yet to make a good laser printout of the image though. It seems pretty clear that the different streams line up horizontally, so there may be a way to pick which stream a letter belongs to by using a ruler.

This little exercise has also brought me a fearsome notion: What if ambiguous letters reside in both text streams rather than one or the other?

As if I don't have enough things driving me mad already...

Re:Boustrophedonic

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem I'm running into is distinguishing between ambiguous characters. For example, on the 2nd line there are numerous 's' characters that could be either small caps or lowercase, and also upside down or right side up.

Yes, as you have discovered, all the characters from each character set will line up. This is due to the old methods of typesetting with pieces of lead type. The baseline of the "s" in the second row does not match the baseline of the inverted smallcaps L later on in that row. The easiest place to see this is at the start of the 10th row, where an S appears next to an inverted smallcaps Y, and the baselines don't line up. However, I couldn't find any clear instances to distinguish a lowercase S from a smallcaps S, or perhaps the typesetter couldn't distinguish them. Perhaps there is no way to distinguish, but this sort of encoding error should not stop a dedicated cryptographer.
It reminds me of an analysis of James Joyce's Ulysses I read about. A scholar got ahold of Joyce's galley proofs, and determined that typesetting errors crept into the text. In some cases Joyce actually liked the errors, and "improved" upon them in his revisions!

Tidbit

[SolaRJetmaN]

I'm a total cryptograph novice, but did anyone else notice how the lower-case 's' looks almost exactly like the small-uppercase 's'? Are they the same character, maybe?

Will work...

[Pollux]

Remembering all the kinds of encrypt forms I learned as a kid, one of the easiest was to throw in dummy characters (things that never meant anything but helped make things look more confusing). There's a few things to look at here:

1) Possibly, some characters (maybe the ones in all caps, the ones upside-down, or whatever) are just thrown in there to confuse the decryptor.

or 2) The different alignment of characters was meant to allude to different meanings. For example, if this letter could have been secretly written by Poe himself, maybe he based the text on allusions to his different works, or maybe on only one alone. Perhaps each letter alluded to a different word in a work of his.

perhaps 3) The combination of the allignment and case of the letters was only meant to throw people off, and instead means absolutely nothing.

Thinking about Poe's work, this particular code seems to fit. In almost all of his works, he has two sides, the light and dark. The fact that the code has right-side-up, upside-down, upper, and lower case seems to blend in with it. Come to think of it, perhaps it is two messages blended into one?

Misnomer.

[cryptomancer]

Yes, I use this virtual appelation of 'cryptomancer'. It however could be construed as a misnomer. It does not mean to imply that I have much of anything to do with encryption. Semi-literally, it means 'code' & 'wizard'. Which is my fancy-shmancy term for my kind of programmer.

But as for this cryptograph's challenge, working it out manually would be as exciting as a year of calculus homework. Writing some script to convert the text into various Rubbish Lists isn't my forte; I'm no script kiddie, I write code. Besides, that would only barely help one find a solution. So, as for this challenge, as intruiguing as it seems, I'll decline.

But I will submit to write an agent suited for the endeavor. Someday soon.

"To make the computer produce the solution you want, you have to find the solution yourself and program it in." --me

Hold on...

[grappler]

First off, I know that this COULD be in a different language, meaningless random gibberish, or based on some horribly obscure document. However, I doubt it. Here's my thoughts:

Here's what gets me - no letters are on top of each other. While this sure looks like it was fed into a typewriter and typed over several times with lowercase, smallcaps, and uppercase, upside down and not, it looks like gaps were left by someone who knew that when he got to that exact spot later, he would need a letter there.

Also, I took your advise and looked up boustrophedon (great word by the way) - it means that every line would start at the same side of the page that the last ended on and go in the opposite direction "as the ox plows". If it is written this way, you would have to turn the paper upside down to type the other direction, so the stream would consist of right side up characters from alternating lines, and upside down from the other lines, and then go back the other way.

I think it is more likely that he did something like this:

o Type the entire right side up portion of the message, leaving gaps where he knew the upside down letters would go.

o Turn the paper around

o Type the rest of the message. Done.

The fact that gaps had to be left implies that some planning went into this before the "final copy" was made. He probably had some rough drafts worked out. Also, he was into cryptograms that people worked out as puzzles, not codes that would be unbreakable. I think it's unlikely that there's some obscure text that he used as a key. If I were making a serious attempt at this, I would look for the following:

o Words broken up differently from the spaces in the message.

o Words written backward, or the entire message backward. Or vise versa.

o Dummy characters. Especially at the end (beginning?)

o Different substitution alphabets for different kinds/orientations of characters in the message. (This is doubtful IMHO)

o boustrophedonic writing, like the guy said.

I'm betting it's cheap tricks like this. You can be surprisingly criptic just doing that.

--
grappler

Re:Hold on...

[gimpboy]

While this sure looks like it was fed into a typewriter and typed over several times with lowercase, smallcaps, and uppercase, upside down and not, it looks like gaps were left by someone who knew that when he got to that exact spot later, he would need a letter there.

150 years ago? I doubt it was typed. This was most likely typeset in a press of some sort. This would explain the space above the inverted letters giving them the apearance that they are subscripted.


john

Re:Hold on...

[grappler]

Good point. In that case, I don't really see any reason why it should be bostrophedonic at all. It could just as easily be regular right-to-left text, in which case I'm betting it is.

--
grappler

Re:Hold on...

[lcrocker]

This wasn't done on a typewriter. It was clearly set in lead type (look at serveral instances of the same letter in the same orientation and they are quite distinct), which makes the inversions a simple matter of mixing normal and inverted letter blocks on each line.

Re:Hold on...

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, I took your advise and looked up boustrophedon (great word by the way) - it means that every line would start at the same side of the page that the last ended on and go in the opposite direction "as the ox plows". If it is written this way, you would have to turn the paper upside down to type the other direction, so the stream would consist of right side up characters from alternating lines, and upside down from the other lines, and then go back the other way.

Right. I'm not envisioning this as a line-by-line boustrophedon, ignore the EOLs and imagine the text as one continuous line of interleaving streams of text. One script reads left to right, then another script is interleaved "backwards" right to left. The "ox plows" one long furrow of (say for example) the upper case text, then turns around and "plows" another furrow of maybe the inverted text right back over the existing one. That's why I called it an "interleaved boustrophedon" although perhaps "multiplexed" might have been a better term. There are lots of ways to adapt a boustrophedon to a cipher stream, and I'm sure Poe would have been aware of this writing technique, as it is discussed in any classical education.

Re:Hold on...

[Seeq]

Grrr. There was no typing involved, it hadn't been invented.

However, with movable type it is trivial to flip characters and mix fonts (Actually, The Small Caps used are probably true small caps in the same size as the rest of the text, mixing point sizes will cause problems because the type has differen height). I grew up with a letterpress and an offset in my basement.

An idea I have is based on how he had to instruct the typesetter to set this [the type] up. Which also suggests that Poe did write it because he needed access to the typesetter to instruct him.
Theory: it is a simple substitution cypher BUT the case of the letter(Upper, Lower, or small caps) modifies the offset to the next letter.
For example: HAL is IBM -1 or rot(-1). lets start with rot(K). Uppercase means K+=3, Lowercase means K+=2, smallcaps mean K+=1. Upsidedown means negate the above changes (or just pick 3 more K modifiers).
Now it is a simple substitution but the rot is different for every letter. So we have 6 K modifiers that happen on each letter (which each could be anything) and obviously we could have backwards words, the entire text upsidedown, and other things to throw us off.

A thought...

[Shin Elendale]

I may be a paranoid nutcase, but something like this would seem to make at least a little sense. What if Poe had created this as a 'last laugh' type of work. Print it in a newspaper and let it lay. Then include a little piece of the answer in every one of his works. Something to the effect of: every 3rd word in his works arranged backwards will unlock the puzzle. Just a thought.

-Elendale (alternatively, he may have just dropped the thing of frustration...)

On the wrong track?

[gothiac]

I have a couple of comments. I've been trying to get into Poe's head here, and I am finding that he would specifically be looking for ways to spoil the typical way of solving these cyphers. Like backward words in the previous example.

Since he solved hundreds of these, he is really in tune with what is used to solve these (which are the trails that most of you seem to be following.) I would expect him to try to foil all or most of those techniques.

I believe that it is solveable. It's a bit too perfect to not be (see what I say later.) And from what scant information I have read that Poe has said about these puzzles, he seems like he would be quite opposed to publishing one that didn't work. And man, did he spend some time typing it in just for a hoax.

6 character sets, or a mutiple of 6, gets us dangerously close to 26 with a multiplier of 4 (6 * 4 ?). Maybe conincidence.

Observations:
You all know this already, but I see 6 classes of 26 characters: lg cap normal, sm cap normal, lg lower normal, lg cap inverted, sm cap inverted, lg lower inverted.

The spaces _look_ like they really could represent spaces. Frequency is about right, and spacing of words seems right.

Take a look at the first 3 lines of the cypher and you will find that there are almost no repeated characters (if you provide that he is using 6 "alphabets.") Repeats come in to play after you go on for a while. I think that there is an alphabet cycling routine going on here, so that the frequency would be perfectly flat! There is NO WAY that this is conincidence.

Notice that, unlike normal words, I don't see any words with repeated letters. This is not simple substitution.

Although I haven't really dug in yet, it seems to be that the different character sets happen more in some instances and less in others. The existence of OGXEW in the very beginning seems to me to be a clue of his algorhythm getting "started" and not into perfect hiding quite yet.

For the 2-d or 3-d theories out there (my theory was that upside down letters were to be read from the bottom to the top, etc.), it's just too darn hard to do such perfect flat freqency if you are dealing with multiple threads of meaning throughout the message. Probably would have taken a computer.

Poe is trying to heavily mask frequency analysis.

Well, that's my $.02.. I'd be interested if anyone could build on this.

Re:On the wrong track?

[cryptomancer]

This really is the right track, imho- problem analysis. And it's not so much looking at the cypher itself, but it's presentation. Published in an article which had been solving cyphers, and with stories which go on to explain the methods of solving (simple) cyphers, if those techniques worked on this, then the author (Poe or Tyler) was just giving another exercise to the readers. But it's not just another exercise, unless the exercise is to let the aspiring codebreaker know that the previous techniques don't work.

Personally, nothing inspires me more than a challenge. (but don't send me any 'challenges', I'm a lazy-assed procrastinator, too.) And that's really what this cypher does- it challenges you to think about new things. If 'simple' cyphers can be cracked by symbol frequency, then mask the frequency somehow, by not having a 1-to-1 correspondence between symbols.
-One means of doing this using the Lewis Carrol encryption algorithm. (look it up!:) I don't think that's at work here, because of the lack of repeated characters- in a Lewis Carrol code, you could see the same character repeated several times, each appearance corresponding to a different character because of the cypher key. (that'll make more sense if you looked it up.;)
-Another means of 'flattening the frequencies' is at work here. Whether or not it's some alphabetic rotation as proposed won't be known until it's cracked. ;) But it seems that this is another part of problem analysis which could yield some good starts- figure out the problems resulting from trying to map 26 characters up to 156. I pose to the reader, how do you choose what set of 26 characters to use, and then what character? (so I pop open the calculator and start shuffling numbers... nothing really conclusive.)
-Following the last idea of character mapping, then there's the matter of building words, and building the paragraph line by line. Maybe the words are encoded, and then their order is determined by another algorithm. (And here I'll give thanks to the Anonymous Coward who offered 'boustrophedon', and to dictionary.com for having the definition!) This compounds the problem of decryption, because finding out how a word is encoded is now foiled by it potentially being upside down and backwards. So in trying to solve the character-mapping problem, you have to think of every which way each word could be turned.

That should be enough thought-provoking schlock for anybody either looking at the problem, or at encryption in general.

"Holy exponential permutations!" -cryptomancer

cipher image as wallpaper

[DrLove]

I made a .bmp suitbale for tiling from the image of the cipher. http://www.radiks.net/human/poe.bmp

$2500 not going to be enough...

[eries]

Some have suggested using some CPU juice to do a brute force crack of the cryptogram. That's probably a good idea, but if you've already got those kinds of tools, are you really going to want to do it for $2500?

My suggestion: /. should offer an "in-kind" reward. For instance, the winner gets to have his face plastered on the /. home page for a day, or gets to have his favorite web site slashdotted, etc.

For most nerds that's a way better incentive.

Want to work at Transmeta? Hedgefund.net? Priceline?

I really dont think this was typed.

[gimpboy]

Then he had to take the paper out of the typewriter and write the upside-down letters

Think about this statement then check HERE


john

Re:I really dont think this was typed.

[Zarf]

Thank you for pounding out this tip. It's most likely a poly-alphabetic cipher where the encryption alphabet is the set of all characters and their inversions... (meaning treat inversions as say greek characters).

The problem with doing this in the computer is that most modern cryptanalyists (myself included) have been spoiled by the computer... we want to see everything in terms of ASCII, or some bit pattern.

We'll have to come up with an enumeration of the cipher text characters to map them into a universe we can deal with. Then we'll have to worry about artifacts in the mapping mathematics altering the cryptanalysis.

With a table and corresponding bit patterns (call it PETi for Poe Encryption Text index) we can now whip out our trusty computers!

So what about the "rotations"? now, now, aren't these simple matrix transformations? affine in nature?

Well, I have to finish my Cryptanalysis toolkit... I'll have to retool for an expanded alpha-set... hack at you later.

- // Zarf //

Some ideas

[Shin Elendale]

Well I looked at it for a while and it looks exactly the same as it did 150 years ago. Unfortunately I don't believe our modern 'brute force' techniques will return anything. I think this cyrptograph is actually based on an algorithm more complex than 'replace a with b, x with i, ad infinitum'. One possibility is that the different positions of the characters mean different things. Alternatively, each character may actually represent a word or idea instead of a different character. One other thought I had was that the first 'word'- Dr- is actually Dr and not something else. It is entirely possible this note starts with a title, and if so that might be used to break the rest of the code.

Now that I'm done with that, here are my thoughts on this little demon. The different arrangements of characters most likely mean something. There are 8 different permutations for each character: up, forward, lowercase; down, forward, lowercase; up, forward, uppercase; down, forward uppercase; up, backward, lowercase; etc. Additionally, the entire work may read left to right, right to left, top to bottom, or bottom to top. In addition to that, there is a complete lack of periods. Perhaps different character positions are equivalent to end of sentance, end of line, end of paragraph, etc. Something else I wonder about is the backward letters. One possibility is that these backward letters actually form a second note embedded inside the first (read only forward letters or only backward letters). Just some thoughts.

-Elendale (Alternatively, whoever sent this may have had no idea how to use a printing press. I think this is much more likely)

Once upon a midnight

[warrax]

I'm sorry that this might be a little off-topic. However, a few weeks ago, I saw a great one-man play (Once upon a Midnight) retelling the story of Poe's life from his point of view, full of biographical information and dramatic readings from Poe's work. Poe was played by John Astin (who was in the Addams Family and played Buddy in the late, great Night Court), who did an unbelievably funny, insightful, and touching job. I think it might be still touring, so I highly recommend it if you get a chance to see it.

I would not be surprised if the cipher really is Poe. He was very interested in such things and by all accounts was more than capable of coming up with an intelligent encryption. (Also equally capable of coming up with a complete hoax, as he did on at least one occasion...)

Astin (as Poe) read from his last work, the obscure and hard-to-find work of metaphysical speculation called Eureka, and Poe's philosophy sounded very much similar to Frank Tipler's Omega Point Theory. Very interesting, very much ahead of its time, and I'd like to get a copy of it, except it doesn't seem to be in print anywhere.

Re:Once upon a midnight

[Yardley]

Published the year before his death.

http://www.19thcenturyshop.com/cgi-bin/VisitorTool s/FullRecord?WebID=1243

"To the few who love me and whom I love-to those who seek rather than to those who think-to the dreamers and those who put faith in dreams as in the only realities-I offer this book of truths . . . ."

-- the Preface to Eureka

POE, EDGAR ALLAN. EUREKA: A PROSE POEM. New York: Putnam, 1848. Original black cloth. Binding A. Some wear to cloth, small chip from spine. A near fine, untouched copy. Cloth case.

FIRST EDITION, FIRST ISSUE, without the review for Eureka on page 2 of the 16 pp catalogue. This is a nice copy of a book which is almost always encountered in unsatisfactory condition.

Poe considered Eureka his magnum opus. Putnam recalled that Poe visited him "with a somewhat nervous and agitated manner" and proposed a first edition of 50,000 copies. Putnam agreed to publish 500 copies. Eureka has often been misunderstood and ridiculed, but it is in fact a remarkable precursor of several modern theories of physics and a powerful essay on the material and spiritual universe.

My thoughts

[Anonymous Coward]

Here are my thoughts on the issue.
Scenarios for why we currently have these puzzles:
1) Poe wrote them himself
2) Poe didn't have time to solve them
3) Poe COULDN'T solve them and made up the "I don't have time" excuse.

Now, the problem I have with number 3 is that, apparently, the first puzzle solved was relatively easy. So him not being able to figure out the first one is kindy of sketchy. Him not having time is a valid one, which I'll sort of hang on to. Him writing them himself (or at least being privvy to their creation) is a very good possibility.

Now onto the puzzles themselves. The biggest question that pops to mind is: Why was the first one so easy to solve? Surely the person that came up with this second, much harder puzzle could have come up with something better for the first. Either they wanted an easy puzzle for the less brainy of their readers (sigh, *.* journalism at it's finest) or something stragner is afoot.

I think the first puzzle may be a hint or key to the second puzzle. How? I don't know. Maybe they contain the same message. Maybe the orientation, etc, of the characters in the second puzzle are actually references to the first puzzle. Like X means the the 23 letter of the puzzle and !a is the 27th. The question, of course, is there at least 225 different characters in the second puzzle (225 is the number I counted, I may have counted wrong - beware) to match up with the first puzzle?

Beyond that I agree with alot of the speculation going on in this forum. It may be separate messages, or it could be one. The orientation of the letters may matter, and it may not. Just have to try different things.

One thing I WOULD like is a list of the other puzzles the Poe solved and published in his books. It may give a clue as to what we may be dealing with. I.e. this may be a Final Exam for his readers to see if they were paying attention.

And kudos to the dude who brought up the 3-2-1-Contact reference. I totally remember that (anything having to do with a broomstick either reminds me of that episode or of the episode of Mr. Wizard with a broomstick, some sand, a toilet paper roll, and a some tissue. Gee, Mr. Wizard was one sick bastard. :)

Cheers,
Joe
tyrant@oz.net

Re:A Hint: STERCUS TAURI

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure you could solve the three-body problem posed by Newton's gravitational theory as well, with one finger in your sphincter, you are just too busy pouring hot grits down your pants to bother.

Re:Reversals are probably capitals (or red herring

[k-rad]

How do you know where midword is? Do you think that those spaces are actual spaces and not random ones? If you read about the first cryptogram that was solved in 1992 they specifically mention that the spaces were insignificant. Therefore the location of a upper or lowercase 'B' in the middle of a sentence could very well be the Beginning, Middle, End, or hell it could even be a punctuation mark for all we know.

For the convenience of amateur cryptography script

[Derek Pomery]

Since the original jpeg would give an OCR program fits, I gave it my best shot. Am currently encoding it as a two character sequence to handle each letter's orientation. (will be a sub-post).
For now, here it is, letter orientations ignored.

To Edgar A. Poe, Esq.
----------- original sequence a square ---------
DR LIK OGXEW PFHFYY NBUH TIA VQSMGQ
XDTBJS SNB ESALNKGYQJCP TVOL HLZGUCC
LTTKRF PR NDDQL VWO HJFXIKFRI GXHYMEE TA
QJETBXPEE YGWPUP BV STAVA NAZ TCGDYRC
DHB YFKXDGF ZCNSMETL RK ORT OFNR ZQH MFG
WCVIEGXHB AML NKU AFKSO IYBJDV BEFSGFLPL
SPZL CEMNSW BGERTH ANJMY SEAYHTAA YAKTXDIX
WG JCP JERK OFQARL NDOTY KCR ORT DJTBGP
SEB DNBLQU LPH NJNJV ALGF DIKY WVO CEPIMXAY
SYJZ EIF KMK XYKSSG HTITAW QBP QTLC DEYJ RVV
UQRCPME NK VFHV LDAH XMKTIAX YE VJR ADFHW
XQCMKUYWEKA GS B AGOIY NMEY RPC GIOQBG
NBTEMMQ NK LCOPR SVIBPLSI NZQ DGTJH YDUGF
RZNK CTE YL W TX JDMNARUFQX GDHYFBRI
BZNL LBTPH FW EETOYDK TIA VIRQMFTV
VVEHQLP DHB NNGJ WC MTEUJYRTF JDV HPHR
KYSXTCEFA GS AML LQIGMXAR WC NFUIKY PM
AGGB MJG ARNWADQ CMR IRZ XRHOEL KSYWTB
CFG JC YK FJEO IDBLSTP IKRZ VNKADQ CTXH
QDJW QCJPPE LUDFA K ADTV B GERPEC UTA VJYI
KJ EMY IW GDF
------------------------------------------------ --

A frequency counter.
#!/usr/local/bin/perl
@sequence=;
foreach(@sequence)
{
chomp;
foreach(split(//))
{
$freq{$_}++;
}
}
foreach (sort(keys(%freq)))
{
$temp=$freq{$_};
$byvalue{$temp} .= "$_,";
}
foreach (reverse(sort(numeric(keys(%byvalue)))))
{
chop($byvalue{$_});
print "$byvalue{$_} has a frequency of $_ \n";
}
sub numeric
{
if ($a ;
for ($i=0; $i 90;
print chr($j);
}
}
print "\n";
}
print "---- NEXT SHIFT ----\n";
}

Argh! Slashdot munged my sript! redone in html...

[Derek Pomery]

ok. Trying in HTML (please tell me it supports Greater then, less then signs...
Frequency counter.

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
@sequence=<STDIN>;
foreach(@sequence)
{
chomp;
foreach(split(//))
{
$freq{$_}++;
}
}
foreach (sort(keys(%freq)))
{
$temp=$freq{$_};
$byvalue{$temp} .= "$_,";
}
foreach (reverse(sort(numeric(keys(%byvalue)))))
{
chop($byvalue{$_});
print "$byvalue{$_} has a frequency of $_ \n";
}
sub numeric
{
if ($a < $b)
{
-1
}
elsif ($a == $b)
{
0
}
else
{
1
}
}

Shifter.
#!/usr/local/bin/perl

@sequence=<STDIN>;
for ($i=0; $i < 26; $i++)
{
foreach (@sequence)
{
chomp;
@string=split(//);
foreach(@string)
{
tr /a-z/A-Z/;
if (/ /)
{
print;
}
else
{
$j=ord();
$j+=$i;
$j-=26 if $j > 90;
print chr($j);
}
}
print "\n";
}
print "---- NEXT SHIFT ----\n";
}

Let's split up the typing work

[Anonymous Coward]

Here are the first five lines, in a perl-usable alphabet. The notation should be obvious: unadorned letters equal themselves; a letter follwed by an 's' is a small caps version of itself; a letter followed by 'u' is the upside-down version, and a letter followed by 'su' is the small caps upside down version. Anyone care to type in more? I'm going crosseyed...

Here's a suggestion. If others want to help with other blocks of five lines each, reply to this message to 'claim' the task for blocks 2, 3, or 4 (block one being the five lines below). Then type away.

D_Rs Lu_i_ku O_G_X_E_W P_fu_hu_F_y_yu Ns_Bu_U_H Tu_I_A V_Q_Su_M_Gu_Qsu

Xs_Ds_T_b_j_s S_N_B Es_Ss_Au_L_Nu_K_gu_Y_Qu Ju_C_P Ts_Vu_o_l H_Lsu_Z_Gs_Us_Csu_Cu

Ls_Tsu_tu_Ku_ru_f Psu_Ru Ns_Du_Ds_Qsu_L vu_Wu_O h_j_Fs_Xu_Iu_Ksu_Fu_Ru_iu g_Xsu_Hsu_yu_Mu_Es_eu T_a

Q_Js_Esu_Ts_B_X_P_e_E y_G_Wsu_d_U_Pu Bu_Vu Su_Tu_A_Vu_au uu_Asu_Zu Ts_Cs_Gu_D_Y_R_Cu

Ds_Hs_Bs Yu_F_K_Xs_Ds_Gs_f Z_Csu_N_Ss_Ms_Es_Tsu_Ls Ru_ku Ou_Rsu_tu Os_fu_Nsu_Lsu Zsu_Qu_h M_f_Gs

Eureka!

[captnkurt]

I have discovered a truly remarkable solution which this comment box is too small to contain. Love, F. Tamer

Impossible to transcribe: impossible to solve

[RomulusNR]

Without having original copy in one's hands (and even with, perhaps), it quite looks impossible to accurately transcribe this cipher.

With so many characters inverted, and with the usage of both small cap and lowercase, any attempt to solve this cipher will be confounded by the inability to retain the real lettering.

For example: Capital H is used among the small-cap alphabet. The H used here, as most Hs are, is rotationally symmetrical. How then can you tell whether this is small cap H, or inverted small cap H? Same for small cap O, I, and possibly S, X and Z (lowercase for those too).

Further, how do you know what looks like a lower case S is not actually a small cap S?

Can you assume that there are no such ambiguities used in this cipher? Can you risk that assumption, if you also assume that inversion and case have functional significance?

And my last one, is how do you know that that lower case P is not an inverted lower case D?

Re:Impossible to transcribe: impossible to solve

[vjzuylen]

I pointed this out a couple of posts ago; Mr. Poe probably wouldn't have overlooked a problem as glaring as this (that is, if he bothered to read back his own encrypted text), so one has to assume it was done intentionally. Ambiguous characters might default to one of the alphabets, or they might constitute an alphabet of their own. Either way, it makes it that much harder to figure out.

Through much grueling effort. Here is ASCII ver.

[Derek Pomery]

(W,V,X,Z and others are hard [impossible?] to distinguish $W, with say ^W)
Refer to http://www.bokler.com/pix/eapoe_crypto_ltr_small.j pg in any possible cases of confusion
Key:
Rightside up paper
!A = Uppercase, Fullsize A
@A = Uppercase, Smallsize A
#A = Lowercase A

Upside down paper
$A = Lowercase, A
%A = Uppercase, Fullsize A
^A = Uppercase, Smallsize A

To Edgar A. Poe, Esq.
----------- original sequence a square ---------
!D@R %L#I$K !O!G!X!E!W !P%F%H!F#Y$Y @N%B!U!H %T!I!A !V!Q%S!M%G^Q
@X@D!T#B#J#S !S!N!B @E@S%A!L%N!K$G!Y%Q %J!C!P @T%V#O#L !H^L!Z@G@U$C%C
@L^T$T%K$R#F ^P%R @N%D@D^Q!L $V^W!O #H#J@F%X%I^K%F%R$I #G^Y@H$Y^M@E$E !T#A
!Q@J%E@T!B!X!P#E!E #Y!G$W#D!U%P %B%V %S%T!A%V$A #N^A%Z @T@C%G!D!Y!R%C
@D@H@B %Y!F!K@X@D@G#F !Z$C!N@S@M@E^T@L %R$K %O^R$T ^O$F^N$R #Z%Q#H !M#F@G
#W$C!V#I#E@G!X@H!B %A$M!L ^N^K^U !A@F@K^S!O #I#Y@B%J!D!V #B^E^F#f#S#G%F%L%P^L
!S@P%Z#L !C!E%M^N!S!W #B!G#E@R^T#H #A!N#J#M^Y @S$E%A$Y$H%T$A$A %Y#A#K$T!X!D!I#X
$W$G %J!C%P @J%E$R!K #O!F%Q!A%R%L @N%D!O!T@Y $K#C#R %O^R$T ^D@J@T!B%G!P
!S!E!B @D%N@B!L%Q#U !L#P@H @N$J#N@J$V #A@L$G^F #D#I@K#Y %W%V#O #C!E#P$I$M%X$A$Y
@S^Y!J%Z #E!I#F @K!M$K @X@Y!K!S%S@G !H^T#I#T%A!W @Q%B!P #Q!T^L^C @D^E@Y#J @R@V@V
!U^Q$R#C^P#M#E #N#K !V!F%H%V #L!D#A#H !X%M%K!T!I@A@X !Y#E $V$J$R #A^D!F$H!W
!X%Q%C^M@K!U^Y^W^E^K$A $G@S @B !A%G!O#I%Y $N$M#E#Y #R#P#C !G%I%O!Q%B#G
%N!B%T!E#M!M@Q #N#K !L#C#O^P^R !S$V!I@B%P^L%S!I !N%Z^Q ^D#G@T#J$H $Y^D@U@G#F
!R!Z#N!K !C^T$E ^Y@L %W$T!X !J@D@M@N%A$R!U%F!Q#X %G!D@H$Y^F!B@R@I
#B#Z%N!L !L@B@T%P#H @F!W #E@E!T#O!Y#D$K %T!I!A !V@I%R^Q!M!F@T@V
@V%V%E@H^Q^L!P ^D@H@B @N!N@G^J %W$C ^M^T$E%U#J%Y#R^T#F %J%D%V $H#P#H$R
@K#Y!S!X#T%C^E%F$A $G@S %A$M!L @L!Q!I#G#M#X^A@R %W$C ^N$F!U#I!K$Y ^P%M
!A%G!G#B !M$J@G @A!R%N$W#A%D!Q @C@M#R $I@R#Z #X$R@H%O!E#L $K!S^Y!W#T@B
!C!F^G ^J^C #Y^K #F#J#E#O %I%D%B^L%S^T!P $I^R#Z !V^U#K%A^D^Q %C%T!X#H
#Q#D!J%W @Q@C%J@P%P$E #L#U#D^F!A !K ^A^D@T%V ^B #G^E@R^P!E^C @U#T$A $V$J@Y!I
!K@J #E#M#Y $I$W %G^D^F
------------------------------------------------ --

ASCII coded for decipher script convenience.

[Derek Pomery]

No guarantees I interpreted them all correctly. Some letters are very hard to tell apart. Especially small-case-capital and lower-case versions of the letters C, O, S, V, W, X, Z

Refer to http://www.bokler.com/pix/eapoe_crypto_ltr_small.j pg in any possible cases of confusion
Key:
Rightside up paper
!A = Uppercase, Fullsize A
@A = Uppercase, Smallsize A
#A = Lowercase A

Upside down paper
$A = Lowercase, A
%A = Uppercase, Fullsize A
^A = Uppercase, Smallsize A

To Edgar A. Poe, Esq.
----------- original sequence a square ---------
!D@R %L#I$K !O!G!X!E!W !P%F%H!F#Y$Y @N%B!U!H %T!I!A !V!Q%S!M%G^Q
@X@D!T#B#J#S !S!N!B @E@S%A!L%N!K$G!Y%Q %J!C!P @T%V#O#L !H^L!Z@G@U$C%C
@L^T$T%K$R#F ^P%R @N%D@D^Q!L $V^W!O #H#J@F%X%I^K%F%R$I #G^Y@H$Y^M@E$E !T#A
!Q@J%E@T!B!X!P#E!E #Y!G$W#D!U%P %B%V %S%T!A%V$A #N^A%Z @T@C%G!D!Y!R%C
@D@H@B %Y!F!K@X@D@G#F !Z$C!N@S@M@E^T@L %R$K %O^R$T ^O$F^N$R #Z%Q#H !M#F@G
#W$C!V#I#E@G!X@H!B %A$M!L ^N^K^U !A@F@K^S!O #I#Y@B%J!D!V #B^E^F#f#S#G%F%L%P^L
!S@P%Z#L !C!E%M^N!S!W #B!G#E@R^T#H #A!N#J#M^Y @S$E%A$Y$H%T$A$A %Y#A#K$T!X!D!I#X
$W$G %J!C%P @J%E$R!K #O!F%Q!A%R%L @N%D!O!T@Y $K#C#R %O^R$T ^D@J@T!B%G!P
!S!E!B @D%N@B!L%Q#U !L#P@H @N$J#N@J$V #A@L$G^F #D#I@K#Y %W%V#O #C!E#P$I$M%X$A$Y
@S^Y!J%Z #E!I#F @K!M$K @X@Y!K!S%S@G !H^T#I#T%A!W @Q%B!P #Q!T^L^C @D^E@Y#J @R@V@V
!U^Q$R#C^P#M#E #N#K !V!F%H%V #L!D#A#H !X%M%K!T!I@A@X !Y#E $V$J$R #A^D!F$H!W
!X%Q%C^M@K!U^Y^W^E^K$A $G@S @B !A%G!O#I%Y $N$M#E#Y #R#P#C !G%I%O!Q%B#G
%N!B%T!E#M!M@Q #N#K !L#C#O^P^R !S$V!I@B%P^L%S!I !N%Z^Q ^D#G@T#J$H $Y^D@U@G#F
!R!Z#N!K !C^T$E ^Y@L %W$T!X !J@D@M@N%A$R!U%F!Q#X %G!D@H$Y^F!B@R@I
#B#Z%N!L !L@B@T%P#H @F!W #E@E!T#O!Y#D$K %T!I!A !V@I%R^Q!M!F@T@V
@V%V%E@H^Q^L!P ^D@H@B @N!N@G^J %W$C ^M^T$E%U#J%Y#R^T#F %J%D%V $H#P#H$R
@K#Y!S!X#T%C^E%F$A $G@S %A$M!L @L!Q!I#G#M#X^A@R %W$C ^N$F!U#I!K$Y ^P%M
!A%G!G#B !M$J@G @A!R%N$W#A%D!Q @C@M#R $I@R#Z #X$R@H%O!E#L $K!S^Y!W#T@B
!C!F^G ^J^C #Y^K #F#J#E#O %I%D%B^L%S^T!P $I^R#Z !V^U#K%A^D^Q %C%T!X#H
#Q#D!J%W @Q@C%J@P%P$E #L#U#D^F!A !K ^A^D@T%V ^B #G^E@R^P!E^C @U#T$A $V$J@Y!I
!K@J #E#M#Y $I$W %G^D^F
------------------------------------------------ --

Frequency counts - rightside up, upside down.

[Derek Pomery]

It's interesting to note there is a lot more text one way, then the other.

> perl -ne 'chomp;foreach(split(//)){if ($last=~/[$%^]/) { print; } $last=$_;}' poe.txt | ./freq.pl
D,T has a frequency of 8
Q has a frequency of 7
L,Y has a frequency of 6
E,F,P has a frequency of 5
K,N,R has a frequency of 4
A,C,M has a frequency of 3
J,U,W has a frequency of 2
B,G,O,S has a frequency of 1

> perl -ne 'chomp;foreach(split(//)){if ($last=~/[!,@,#]/) { print; } $last=$_;}' poe.txt | ./freq.pl
E has a frequency of 22
B has a frequency of 20
G,L has a frequency of 19
D,F,H,I,T has a frequency of 18
A,K,X has a frequency of 17
N,S,Y has a frequency of 16
J has a frequency of 15
M,R has a frequency of 14
C,P has a frequency of 13
O,Q,U has a frequency of 11
V has a frequency of 10
W,Z has a frequency of 7

Interesting letter counts

[The Wookie]

If you count the letter frequencies, ignoring the size and orientation of the letters, the count is quite uniform. Looking at the counts for the letters in various sizes and orientations, I noticed that the large letters have an unusual distribution.

For the large, rightside up letters, there are no fewer than 3 of any letter and no more than 9.

For the large, upside-down letters, the counts range from 1 to 8.

If you remove the large letters, the overall frequency counts fall a lot more in line. I wonder if it could be a combination of 4 substitution ciphers after the large letters are removed.

Anyone care to investigate further?

Possible algorithm

[Anonymous Coward]

I have another idea for an algorithm that could be used here. Lets say that you take the state of the letter and use it as a directive, but not to shift the letter itself in the message, but do another shift. Either shift the current letter's value in the alphabet. For example, an UPPERCASE letter might mean shift 3 to the right, so an 'A' would have a resulting value of 'd'. An !upsidedown letter could mean shift 5 left. So an '!e' would be 'a'. Combining the two methods would have either an additive effect (3 right for UPPERCASE, 5 left for upside down), or another arbitrary effect (4 right). Now this would make this a bitch to solve, but a brute force attack would do it. The other transform is more twisted. Once again, the state of the letter means something. This time, it means "take the value of the letter XXX to the [left | right]". The whole thing would be one of those jigsaw puzzles that is really tough, but as soon as one piece falls in, the whole thing is in place. This could be further complicated by this addition. You look at the character to the left or right (depending on this state) that is (alphabet position of me) away. This make the letter a self referencing chain. I doubt that this might be the case, because encoding this puppy would take some serious time and effort. Decoding it would also be a pain in the ass. The cleartext message itself would also have to be worded in a way that worked. But sure as hell this would make for a tough one to break. -- Krys krys@mail.rit.edu

its not boustrophedonic for sure...

[8Complex]

look at lines 5 & 8... they both have upside-down Ort's towards the end... if you follow with your finger you'll see that if you go over it one way then back the other through the rows, you'll cross this obviously same word the wrong direction the second time. Only way this could be is if certain letters were represented by several characters and it could be repeated backwards like MOM or DAD or BOB or RADAR, etc.

- 8Complex

I FIGURED IT OUT!!!@~!@!~@~!!~!!!!@!

[Vorro]

About a week ago, I asked my brother to make me a peanut-butter and jelly sandwich, since he was making himself one - i figured it wouldn't be too much trouble.

He said no.

10 minutes ago, he knocks on my door and hands me a PB&J on potato rye. As he is walking out the door, I say "thank you"... but with a mouth full of PB&J, it sounded something like "TbRfaamQz".

Thats when i figued it out... I figured out the encryption algorighim!!!!

After discovering the secret to PB&J encryption, reversing the cycle and finding the cypher for reverse PB&J encoding was quite easy.

Now go make yourself a sandwich, read the encrypted page, and enjoy! I won't spoil the answer here, you'll enjoy it much more if you taste it for yourself :)

Vorro
---------------------------
A wise man speaks because he has something to say.
A foolish man speaks because he has to say something.

Insight from the English profession

[GeorgePBurdell]

Hey gang,

As a grad student in English, I think I can solve this little puzzle:

You can pretty much bet that any "English" person who claims to suddenly "discover" a puzzle, riddle, or crypto doesn't know anything at all about puzzles, riddles, or especially crypto. English professors get paid to publish *any*thing new. If they can find a supposed "unsolvable" puzzle, it means a potential theory book for them, and a lecutre tour. Don't believe the hype.

GPB

Re:Well of course it's soluble! -that's been done

[Super_Frosty]

Now there's an idea for an encryption algorithm, one that yields a false plaintext if an incorrect key is used

Like the one time pad? You XOR the plaintext and the key, to come up wth a cyphertext. If the key is as long as the message, any decryption is equally likely.

ASHUFBCFPOEAMK

could decrypt to

I troll often. OR
A horny goose.

Poe Cryptograph Proved Unsolvable!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

This just in! A team of chemists at the Univerity of Kentucky were intrigued when a Slashdot post implied the Poe Cryptograph to be insoluble. After much experimentation, the chemists showed that the Cryptograph will disolve in no known solute! This is probably due to the fact that it is a CONCEPT and not a SUBSTANCE. The chemists due admit, however, that it may be solvable. Morons.

Re:Poe Cryptograph Proved Unsolvable!!!

[gothiac]

"Insoluble" comes from the letter that W.B. Tyler wrote to Poe, "...and they would doubtless imagine that the more complicated the method of constructing such a cipher, the more insoluble -- to use a chemical expression -- would be the puzzle...."

original article

[osok]

here is the original article, with the letter of W.B. Tyler: http://www.eapoe.org/works/essays/gm41sw03.htm

what bothers me is that if you use 6 alphabets you get 6 * 26 = 156 different characters.
Tyler (Poe?) speaks in its letter of a 130 different characters used in this cipher...
(5*26)....

I also saw that the first paragraph of the article written by Edgar is exactly 130 characters (coincidence?)

Interesting twists and turns

[MomusAK]

There are two sets of alphabets I believe, the upside down and the right side up. Interlocking them together is the key. In the Right side up key, you have the OGXEW and the SNB as starters and for the upside down you have a couple more like BV, assuming that the two alphabets wouldn't intersect you can go from there. Also the typesetting on the characters is strange, one line you have more characters than the other lines or vice versa. They all aren't the same length because all letters in a press were rectangular and had differing widths. I am curious, in my mind I see Poe in the typesetting room, putting the letters in himself, not caring about the size of each letter but putting in spaces to make it totally square. Idiocy is best served dead

Re:Impossible to transcribe: NOT

[Seeq]

It is quit obvious, really. Download the big .jpg, use gimp to print it out at 600 dpi, and it will be much clearer.

Now notice that upsidedown vs. rightside up is obvious from the location of the baseline of each character. In addition in the font used (and all serif font's I have seen) the serifs at the top and bottom of a letter are different.

As to size, that is obvious. The only possible ambiguity is between a lowercase s and a smallcaps s (or equivalent). Again, the serif's are a the giveaway. I'll proofread one of these transcriptions I see and post if I see anything incorrect.

My Grandfather was a printer
I grew up with printing presses in my basement (letterpress and offset)
I did letterpress jobs in collage
Two of my three degreed jobs were in the printing industry, dealing with fonts and digital printing

Brynn

It's a Perl regex!

[(boojum|snark)]

$solution =~ s/dr lik ogxew pfhfyy nbuh...//gim;

That or it's the output of make bzlilo on Poenux 2.2.14-eap.

I'll tell you one thing for sure

[Anonymous Coward]

It's certainly not simple letter replacement. the first line has 29 unique characters in it. Assuming that Poe wasn't strung out on something (like normal) the key is probably in the message it self or alluded to in some of poe's works (assuming he did write the message). It may have something to do with the four different character sets (upper and lower case letters both normal and upside down). But this is just off the top of my head which may be shoved up my ass right now.

Word Deduction method

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the puzzle has a solution. My approach has been looking at words then trying to deduce what they are with logic. for example there is !iR!z and !i!R!z this tells me that they are both three letter words with different middle letters. There are not that many three letter words with the same first and last letter. I think this is a good starting place. The encryption is probably based on the orientation and size of the letters. Once a few letters can be figured out it might be possible to use them to solve the rest. glizzy Plan_B@hushmail.com

Re:Word Deduction method

[Ilciclone]

>The encryption is probably based on the >orientation and size of the letters

I think this is a normal letter substitution chipher. With the difference that each plain text letter can be encrypted to 6 different letters (since he uses 66 different character sets). I seriously doubt it's any of those super-mega-ninja algorithms he used.. After all it's done in the early 1800.. I think that your word deduction meothod is pretty much the way to go. F.ex the letter B, !B and K stand by themselves in the text, so they are probaby either 'I' or 'A'. I pretty sure the B should be translated to 'I'. Just guessing though.

anyone know of a dictionary

[Ilciclone]

Anyone know of a dictionary where you can search for words using regexp? It would certainly help if you f.ex are looking for a word with 11 letters where the 7th letter is a 't'.

Read the letter! And what about the misspellings?

[cybe]

Everybody should read the Letter from W. B. Tyler to Poe before guessing about the crypto!

In the letter Tyler speaks of both his cryptos, comparing them, and points out the weakness of the first one, solved in 1992.
For example:

"In the following specimen of this method, I have employed the Roman-capital, small letter, and small capital, with their several inversions, giving me the command of 130 characters, or an average of five to each letter."

I see no reason for him to say one thing and do another..

Any comments appreciated..

Another thing that might be of importance is that there are differences in the two images I found, compare picture 1 with picture 2.

~cybe's two cents

Early Obfuscated DeCSS Contest entry?

[Cy Guy]

Actually, it was just an early entry in the Obfuscated DeCSS Contest.