Cracking the Quicksilver Code

wka writes "Todd Garrison describes in detail how he solved the cryptographic puzzle promoting Neal Stephenson's forthcoming book Quicksilver, and the reward for his effort. Stephenson himself calls Garrison's story 'remarkable' because Garrison was completely unfamiliar with the system of writing (Real Character) used in the puzzle. Also, Stephenson notes that the system and its creator play roles in The Baroque Cycle."

Comments

Slashdotted ...

[bigjocker]

I'm having trouble loading the page 3, that subscription thinguie should last a little longer .... anyways, here are the first two pages from Mozilla's cache ... if yo can post the 3rd page, reply to this message:

By Todd Garrison

This blow-by-blow account was created for all the Neal Stephenson readers who, in anticipation of his upcoming book, Quicksilver, took it upon themselves to try to solve the cryptographic puzzle they encountered at the Baroque Cycle Web site. If you had difficulty making heads or tails of it or are simply curious as to what it all means, what follows is an explanation of how one person arrived at the solution. Bear in mind that this narrative will reveal the translation of the code written in Wilkins's script, so if you are still interested in solving it for yourself, you may want to reconsider reading further.

Some time ago I received an email from HarperCollins's Author Tracker system, notifying me of some news relating to the publication of Quicksilver. I was directed to their promotional Web site, www.baroquecycle.com, where they had posted some information about its release date, an author bio and an excerpt from the book. Now sated, my attention was drawn once again to its strange introductory page. Without fanfare, nor any form of communication whatsoever, appeared this image of some parchment strewn with strange symbols. Added in the corners were little icons of what appeared to be oldish-looking glassware. What a strange way to welcome you to the site, I thought. In order to get to the Good Stuff, one must first pass through this page--an indication that it was meant to be noticed. Was this some sort of secret message? If this had anything to do with Neal Stephenson, I found it hard to believe it was all just window dressing. Sensing there was a mystery to be uncovered, I decided to dive in and see what I could come up with.

I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

Page 2 (cont.)

I started with the assumption that if this was intended for a mass audience to figure out, there had to be a relatively simple solution lurking out there. My first thought was that this "code" was concocted out of thin air, designed to look old. Cryptonomicon had taught me some things about codes, and assuming each symbol stood for a particular letter of the alphabet, I knew that frequency analysis was a tool often used for decoding simple substitution ciphers. This is the process whereby one counts the occurrence of each symbol and compares it with a normal letter distribution for written English. Therefore, with the letter "E" being the most common, I should then be able to substitute it for the most common symbol; likewise for the next most common letter, "T," then "A," and so on. Unfortunately, this strange alphabet seemed to have well more than 30 letters and only a few of them were used more than once. Mr. Stephenson, one - Todd, nada.

I was still convinced the solution was a simple one, so my next thought was to try looking at TrueType fonts of ancient languages, reasoning that if I found the correct one, all I had to do was key in the ciphertext and change the typeface to say, Times Roman, and the translated message would magically appear. But more than a hundred or so unsuccessful attempts later, this line of thinking was also abandoned. It was starting to get ugly.

I needed to take stock of the situation; it occurred to me that there no longer appeared to be a simple solution I could arrive at with basic guesswork. The only clues I had to work with were derived from the excerpt, and it had to somehow be tied in with the people or ideas from that period. Therefore it was probably pretty old, had something to do with alchemy, Kabalism or the occult, and it might have been the product of one of the leading scientific minds of the 17th century, etc.

The key to deciphering the message seemed to be predicated on finding a real-life example of this strange writing. Once that happened, the p

Re:Slashdotted ...

[Donut2099]

Page 3 (cont.)

My biggest wild goose chase was a result of discovering some all-too-coincidental similarities between a biblical Enoch and Enoch Root, the casually ethereal character from Cryptonomicon, who, I discovered while reading the excerpt, appears in Quicksilver as well. Digging through such concepts as Enochian Magick, the Book of Enoch, and even an Enochian alphabet, the existing parallels were a little too spooky to dismiss without some serious fact checking. I'll spare you the grim details of every connection-based lead I chased down, but I will say that I learned enough about the prophet Enoch over the course of the next couple days to start forming my own conspiracy theories about the beloved Enoch Root. Be that as it may, my once-promising leads melted away, and in the end, I was left with only the salty taste of red herring in my mouth.

(time elapses as more leads fizzle out...)

After much cursing of the name Neal Stephenson and almost burning my own copy of Cryptonomicon on general principal, I returned to cross-referencing "codes" and "secret writing" with names and concepts mentioned in the excerpt. Strangely, it was a bizarre collision with John Hooke, another great mind from the 17th century, that propelled me into the final phase of my search.

While investigating Hooke, like a two-by-four to the stomach, I somehow stumbled upon a real-world, honest to goodness, graphic example of the writing I was looking for! I couldn't believe my eyes. Finally, proof that this ancient language existed! In one fell swoop, my quest had been validated, and I felt energized enough to see this damn thing through.

To make a long story slightly less so, Hooke was erroneously credited for the creation of this mysterious alphabet, and only through another sufficiently high number of wrong turns later did I make the connection to its true inventor, John Wilkins.

Once I found Wilkins, it soon became clear that what I was dealing with here was no ordinary code or simple system for secret writing, but an entire language.

This all led to An Essay Toward a Real Character and a Philosophical Language, of course, but to decode the message, I needed the book. Unable to find one, I did manage to find the next best thing--a Rosetta Stone of sorts--a scanned image from one of the pages from his book that used the Lord's Prayer as an example. He had written the prayer in his Real Character, and displayed beneath each symbol was the English translation. Using that translation, I was able to decode a few words of my text, but from this a couple of things became apparent: 1) each symbol represented, not individual letters, but whole words, and; 2) I would need the whole book if I were to have any chance at decoding the rest of the message.

thats as far as I got, wait 20 seconds... post!

Re:Remarkable

[Anonymous Coward]

I also think Garrison's story is remarkable in that you'd think just about anyone would have better things to do with his or her time than crack a fake cipher being used as a promotional tool for a book.

Right, like posting to slashdot to belittle an effort to crack a fake cipher being used as a promotional tool for a book.

Re:Wilkins' "universal" language is English?

[Dashmon]

What I think Real Character does is break up not the english language, but the ideas the words in that language represent. Those ideas exist in almost all languages for the largest part - so if you know what eacht "break up" means, you get a description of what the character means, in your own language.

The system might, for example, have a way of saying "this word is a noun, it's something abstract, it's something postive", etc., and you might end up with something that can only mean "good". "Good" in itself is an english word, but if you know the sytem, you could still apply it using another language, and come up with the meaning of the character in your language, or, if you're advanced enough, you might be able to understand the meaning without having to translate (that's how really knowing a language works - you know what is ment by words without having to think about/translate them).

That way, this system'd allow for people who speak totally different languages to understand eachother by describing the meaning of words using a universal system. At least, that's what I think it does. Can anyone confirm?

Re:I found Snow Crash fairly weak

[Tackhead]

> Starts off well, but loses it long before the fairly disappointing conclusion. It didn't make me want to rush out and get Cryptonomicon, which I've never bothered to read.

Yeah, give Cryptonomicon a chance. After two or three novels, he's gotten to the point where he can end a novel in about 4-5 pages, rather than just a paragraph or two.

I'm a Stephenson fan, and Snow Crash is among my favorite reads, but I do feel your pain. It's as if the ending of most of his books is cut off in mid-

More crypto fun!

[bastion]

CIA Kryptos Sculpture

Located in the northwest corner of the New Headquarters Building courtyard is a sculpture by artist James Sanborn entitled "Kryptos." Dedicated on November 3, 1990, the theme of this sculpture is "intelligence gathering." "Kryptos" incorporates native American materials such as wood and metal. A piece of petrified wood supports a large S-shaped copper screen that looks like a piece of paper coming out of a computer printer. On the "paper" are inscribed several enigmatic messages, each written in a different code.

CIA Website

ABC News Article