Slashdot Mirror
Cryptic Code Stumps Experts
moonboy writes "From the CBSNews.com article: 'The experts who cracked Nazi Germany's secret codes are tackling a 10-letter enigma that has stumped fine minds for more than 250 years - D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M. Former code-breakers from Britain's World War II intelligence center at Bletchley Park set out this week to decipher a cryptic inscription on an 18th-century monument at an English country estate. Legend says it reveals the location of the Holy Grail. Some believe it is a private message to a deceased beloved. No one knows for sure."
Maybe it just means nothing?
-If God wanted people to be better than me, he would have made them that way.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
Seriously, how much information can be in 10 letters? not to mention this is only 250 years old and the grail went missing over 1000 years ago... sounds like they got punk'd
drunk chemists
LOL, WTF? IMO, IIRC, tho IANAL, this looks familiar!
Isn't that the code for infinite lives on Contra?
Another mind boggler...
U U D D L R L R B A S
I need more lower case letters so that this will actually post, hehe.
after reading the article, no one suggests that it could be complete jibberish. How do they know it's not completely random? There's people out there like myself who enough of a bastard to do exactly that to baffle people for as long as the memorial exists...
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
If they really want to know where the Holy Grail is, they should just ask the old man in Scene 24.
When you look at the state of the world, how can you not become a radical, liberal anarchist?
D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M, eh? That's easy. It stands for "Does Our Universe Often Say Very Ambiguous Variegated...." oh. I give up. Don't listen to me, I'm a moron. I apologize. That could have been really funny in the hands of the right /.er. Me, I dropped the ball and said something amazingly stupid. I think I'm gonna go cry now.
"All Your Base Are Belong To Us"
I.S. O.V.R. T.H.E.R.E
Unfortunatly, the arrow that would accompany the message must have gotten rubbed off.
:)
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Most old geezers sit around and do the cryptic crossword when they retire. I guess these guys need something a little more challenging. :)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
He must have died while carving it.
clearly it was test run with enigma and says:
F.I.R.S.T._.P.O.S.T
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
I've seen it. It's actually a three line inscription. The entire text reads as follows:
S T E A L U N D E R W E A R
D O U O S V A V V M
P R O F I T !
QBHBFINIIZ. Nope. I give up.
It's an ancient Greek slogan, often used to commemorate the Greeks' victories over their opponents in war. Curiously, the slogan is not grammatically correct, even in the original Greek, but the fractured phrase, once established, was never corrected out of deference to tradition.
So in English, it roughly translates as:
All
Your
Base
Are
Belong
To
Us
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
The best possible answer, barring actually finding the holy grail, is quoted in the article.
"Lord Lichfield's grandmother believed it stood for the opening letters of a line of verse: "Out of your own sweet vale Alicia vanish vanity 'twixt deity and man." based on a poem by Anna Seward.
How would it be possible to come up with a better explanation? This woman was of the family and is in the best possition to know. Think about it: what type of answer could satisfy such a short "code" better?
Its like reading Nostradamus: you will find patterns if you look hard enough.
It's just an acronym!:
D.O.U.O.S.B.A.V.V.M:
"Deadly Odour: Underpants Or Socks Violently Aromatic - Very Very Manky."
The entropy of the English language is 1.5 bits per character (as an example; other languages have other entropy characteristics). When performing cryptanalysis on ciphertext derived from English plaintext, the cryptographer can determine whether or not he has achieved successful decryption by calculating this entropy on the result. The accuracy of the entropy derivation depends largely on the quantity of the data used to calculate the entropy.
It appears that the message D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M. does not carry near enough information to derive any meaningful statistical information of the sort. This means pretty much that any potential decryption is as good as any other. In the worst case scenario, this message is the result of a one-time pad, in which case it is completely futile to attempt to decrypt it; even if P is proven to be equal to NP, one-time pads still maintain their security, since all possible decryptions are equally probable. Perhaps some information get be gleaned from the context of the message (the fact that it is either Latin or Greek and based on some historical happening).
In any case, I get the feeling that this particular puzzle is going to be eternally unsolved. There will be plenty of equally feasible decipherments based on defendable premises, but we will never know for sure.
An unjust law is no law at all. - St. Augustine
Looking at just the letters is misleading. The letters are on a monument with a mirror image of a known painting, and even within the letters, the D and M are positioned differently, and there are the words 'Et in arcadia ego' with the image.
Add to that that other aspects of the monument may be significant, or there may be significance in the context of other monuments in the garden and/or other entities.
Now as to whether it will be solved, can be solved without knowledge of an inside joke, or even contains interesting subject matter at all is one issue. If it does have meaning, I would give it better odds of being figured out than a plain 10-letter inscription.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Come on... It's quite obvious that it's a cheat mode for a popular 18th century FPS. D O U O S V A V V M = Extra Ammo
Duh.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
your mother was a hamster and your father smells of elderberries!
They probably died before they could buy a vowel.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
Select Webpages From Google Where Upper(Words) like "D% O% U% O% S% V% A% V% V% M%"
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
That was until someone got in touch with a former vicar, who informed them the mysterious "HWP" was in fact...Hot Water Pipe.
Plays violent online games as: Nerfherder76
I was looking through all these posts to see if anyone had placed a link to a picture of the actual monument, and couldn't find one, so I poked around a bit, and found a photo of the monument here. Just click on the one on the right and you can see a bigger version.
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
There are two problems with deciphering this:
1) No one knows if it is meant to be difficult to crack, or if it is just an abbreviated message to someone who would know instantly what it meant. This is an important distinction, because it determines if solving this thing is in the domain of linguists, or of cryptographers. Linguists decipher things which are not maliciously written to be obtuse (e.g., Champollion didn't have to crack any codes to figure out Egyptian Hieroglyphs, he solved it because he knew several languages and made some educated guesses based on his cultural knowledge). On the other hand, cryptographers decipher things which *are* meant to be obfuscated. This is done primarily through mathematical analyses, rather than historical and cultural knowledge. This is the reason that no cryptographer has been responsible for the decipherment of a language. This problem has been exploited in the past, such as the famous use of Navajo in World War II to confuse German code-breakers. Cryptographers can exploit the qualities of a language (such as examining letter frequency), but they aren't even sure what language this thing is in!
2) The sample set is staggeringly small. Whether you are deciphering a language or a code, it's extremely difficult (and generally close to impossible) to do so without several different, lengthy samples. Often, people make the claim that something is "gibberish" when there's only one or two samples (as someone does in this article). This is really a baseless claim, since there are probably *dozens* of valid decipherments of anything. This is the sole reason why so many undeciphered languages have not been deciphered (e.g., Etruscan and Linear A).
When I read the summary, the first thing I thought of was the Phaistos Disk. It was found on Crete in 1908 (at Phaistos). It is a disk-shaped tablet, with strange, oddly un-Minoan, characters on both sides, spiraling in towards the center. It is even stranger because the characters appear to be stamped or pressed into the clay. (This is the earliest known example of such stamped writing.) Because the disk is so strange, many have claimed it's an elaborate hoax, but the amount of work necessary to create such a stamped tablet (making all of the stamps with which to place the characters on the disk) would mean it is a *very* elaborate hoax. Most archaeologists think it's for real, but, despite people's best efforts, no progress has been made in its decipherment. Since the sample set is so damned small (1 tablet), and since no one knows what language it's in, *and* since it is clearly unrelated to Linear A or B, there's little hope in it ever being understood. Go on Google and type in "Phaistos Disk" and you're sure to find lots of sites claiming they know the solution.
Finally, the Voynich Manuscript sets even more historical precedent for the difficulty of this task, and shows that cryptographers are not successful when it comes to solving an unencoded inscription. William F. Friedman (who broke the Japanese Purple Code and worked at Bletchley Park during WWII) and some guys from the NSA have tried to decipher it, and failed. He claims it's a fake language, composed of gibberish, but it follows Zipf's law, which means it appears, based on the ratios of sign frequencies, to be real...so if someone wrote a gibberish language, they knew what they were doing to make it look real...even though Zipf, who discovered this relationship, wasn't even alive when this thing was written.
Sorry I didn't make any links, but I'm lazy, and if you type any of this stuff into Google, you'll find lots of articles.
(Wow, looks like I learned something from my Lost Languages and Decipherment course, thank-you, Professor Zimansky.)
There is an academic article discussing the purported relationship between the "D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M" code and the Holy Grail: The Mysteries of Rennes-le-Chateau and the Prieure du Sion. The article is by Dr. Steven Mizrach of Florida International University.
The book discussing the subject is: Holy Blood, Holy Grail. This is the book that inspired (or was ripped off) by The Da Vinci Code.
The Disinformation page on the subject is: here.
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
The original painting, and a bit of information on the phrase "et in arcadia ego" can be found here (bigger version of the painting here. Note that you can't really make out the letters in either)
I first heard the phrase while studying Tom Stoppard's Arcadia in school, and our interpretation was close to one of the two on wikipedia:
"I, Death, am also in Arcadia"
This is a memento mori, a reminder that death is certain even if life seems perfect at the moment.
The painting features 4 shepherds in "Arcadia" (a pastoral paradise), puzzling over those words engraved in a small monument.
The artist of the Shugborough version may very well have intended for us to puzzle over his version like the shepherds in the original... and if the act of us puzzling over the carving was the artist's goal, there may well be no solution like there would be in normal puzzles. (Or there might only an arbitrary solution that cannot be attained without further data.)
Perhaps some poets should look at it in addition to code breakers.
Legend says it reveals the location of the Holy Grail.
This is of course based on the assumption that The Holy Grail is an object. Most often it refers to the cup Jesus drank from at the last supper, or the cup used to catch his blood as he hung on the cross, or both.
This is most likely a mistake, or a misunderstanding due to faulty translation of the original text.
The original term used for the holy grail is "sangraal", and that's where the problem starts.
San Graal does in fact mean "Holy Grail".
Sang Raal however, means "Royal Blood".
Since there is ample evidence to suggest Jesus was in fact the descendant of Solomon and David, and therefore he was true Royalty, the rightful heir to the throne of Palestine, and a threat to the Roman Empire. Which is exactly why they killed him (jews did not), if he was even killed, which is not even certain and cannot be proven.
So if Royal Blood is indeed the proper translation of sangraal, and due to its inherent connection with Christianity then it most likely refers to Jesus' bloodline.
As is generally believed, Mary Magdalen moved to the South of France after the crucifixion carrying with her the Holy Grail, so it's not such a big leap of logic to assume the Holy Grail was in fact Jesus' son, being brought out of Palestine in order to save his life, and the Royal bloodline.
There is also ample suggestion in the gospels of Jesus being married, and that Mary Magdalen and Mary of Bethany were one and the same. Seeing how close Jesus was to this Mary of Bethany, and her brother Lazarus, it's also very likely Lazarus was in fact Jesus' brother-in-law, and that Mary Magdalen was in fact Mary of Bethany.
Also, Mary Magdalen was not a prostitute and Magdalen was not her last name. If you can point to the passage in the Bible that specifically says she was a prostitute, please make a note of it and inform the world, because not a single biblical or historical scholar has been able to do so to this day. It is in fact a lie concocted by religious leaders trying to obfuscate the fact Jesus was a married man with a family; being married and having children was practically required at that time and it's unfathomable that he didn't.
If you found any of what I said interesting or infuriating, please read "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" available here.
Oh, and in case you were still wondering, I am an Atheist.
However, just to stay a little bit more on topic, here are a few suggestions as to what DOUOSVAVVM stands for:
Designed Overreacting Usage Of Some Very Agitated Violent Viagra Malfunction.
Do Only Uneducated Overly Simplistic Villains Accept Very Violent Methods?
Deaths Of Unbridled Overreaching Sacrifices Values And Virtue Very Much.
But of course, DOUOSVAVVM is NOT an english acronym...
-- This sig for rent.
When I die, i want to be burried in an elaborate toomb, with false dates, and lots of armor and shit, and an inscription in Latin and Greek that reads "Here lies the king of all that is and ever will be." Imagine when archaeologists dig me up in a few thousand years :-)
This, However, I suspect is an abreviation of Latin words.
While the famous version of Les Bergers d'Arcadie shows a version that is reversed from this monument, other versions were created. One version came several years before the famous one. This page shows both.
But most interestingly (and cryptically) is this image. I don't know the origin of this engraving, but it is almost exactly the same as as the monument. Down to the swirling clouds, which actually aren't present in the famous version! The only obvious difference is the present of an additional urn on top of the sarcophagus in the monument. I have little doubt that either this engraving was created from the monument, or the monument was created from this engraving.
Can anyone offer anymore insight into this engraving?
Punctanym: alternate spelling of words using punctuation or numerals in place of some or all of its letters; see 'leet'
Actually, one of the recruitment avenues that they took for Bletchley Park was weeding out the nation's best crossword solvers through a competition (http://www.historyarticles.com/bletchley_park.htm ).
> I find it hard to believe that they'll find the Holy Grail from a 10 letter code.
I can do it in 8:
Rennes, France, Castle, East Tower, Attic, Behind Fireplace.
.
Marxist evolution is just N generations away!
God's favorite mint:
Testamints.
Yes, they exist. And they actually taste great...
The code is indeed directions to the holy grail (well, close enough), it breaks down like this
"Up Down Up Down Left Right Left Right A B A B Select Start"
Virtually All Voluminous Virginal Men
Slashdot, eh? Evidently a work of divination! There was also mention of the location of the Holy Grail - but I think they were probably mistaken.
Be careful! New moon tonight.
No, that's the Holey Grill, not the Holy Grail.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
If you look up "Anna Seward" 1747-1809, the poet who wrote the prose "of ure own sweet vale Alicia vanish vanity 'twixt deity and man", you'll find her father was a canon at Lichfield Cathedral in 1757, and she was dubbed the "Swan of Lichfield".
Now go back and read the article. I don't think there's any enigma here.
The monument is the right age, the text fits, the descendants have the right story.
here's my theory...
2 222222
if it's a location of the holy grail (assuming it's the holy grail) then there has to be numbers, most likley a lagitude and latitude values
so here's the deal...
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
0000000001111111111
12345678901234567890123456
so by getting the numbers of each letter we get the following values
4 15 21 15 19 22 1 22 22 13
so now we will join each latitude/longitude value as in (latitude/longitude)
4/15 connects to 21/15 which connects to 19/22 which connects to 1/22 which connects to 22/13
after connecting these we have a sort of triangule in around central africa, and to add more interest it surrounds the country of CHAD (Map [gesource.ac.uk] and Info [gesource.ac.uk]) which has been in the news a few years ago about a discovery of the oldest skull found that might related to the human being (news [csmonitor.com].
quoting from that news:
What's more, it was found along the shores of a dry lake in the country of Chad, 1,500 miles west of the east African rift valleys often called "the cradle of humankind."
For years, lead researcher Michel Brunet has tilted mostly unsuccessfully against the long-held theory that hominids emerged from the Great Rift Valley around Kenya then spread westward across Africa and into the broader world. Now, in the hominid he has named Toumai, or "hope of life" in the local language, he has proof that the earliest prehumans covered a larger area.
interesting eh?
clepto9@excite.com
It's obvious where the grail is...
Down. Over. Up. Over. South. V... Vest. Ah, fuck it.
Im more than certain that this is a publicity stunt. A very good one apparently that it should appear on CBS. "As it happens!" I was at Shugborough Hall on this very same day. I was doing a bit-part in a documentary called "All The Queens Cooks". There were a number of people milling around doing press-shoots etc. But to me it seemed like a stunt, to get people to visit the Hall, I think it also some sort of anniversary of the Enigma or Alan Turing round about now too.
...
They had got the Enigma all layed out on display on a table with red velvet, (ie for show). In reality if the real purpose of this excersize was to crack those codes dont you think they would have used a laptop with an enigma simulator/code cracking program? So while they may be attempting to crack that code I think there were also some alterior motives on their mind, like getting a bit of publicity for the tourist trade!
nick
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp