Poe's Puzzle

[kitakaze]

Has anyone else looked at Poe's cryptogram, that the Minotaur posted recently?

I've got it printed on my desk, but it looks rather nasty.

I'm guessing that POE set up 3 or more different substitution characters for each letter.

He has letters large and small, upper and lower case, inverted and right side up, which gives him a huge base of characters to work with.

Anyone out there know any tricks to solving these things?

Kaze

[Sofis]

One thing I noticed in the cryptograph is how two three-letter words are very much alike. They're located close to the end of the text, one above the other, and the only difference is the middle letter, which is inverted in one word and not in the other. Possibly the words mean the same thing... or possibly its a red herring.

[araya]

hey kaze, Acid and I have been discussing the problem via ICQ. We haven't been working too much on it but if you want to help us you should contact one of us.. I don't really want to discuss any findings in public seeing as how someone could use that to solve it and claim the prize themself. Not that I think I am going to solve it..

btw, it's not Poe's cypher, Poe was actually unable to solve it.

[Wonko the Sane]

Just because Poe didn't solve it, doesn't mean he didn't make it. Why would you go and give everything the solution after going through the trouble of making it? If he did write it, he probably intentionally didn't solve it.

[araya]

This is true.. on the other hand, Poe seemed very proud of his ability to solve any code - if he did write them himself, he must have realized that it appeared he couldn't solve them, which likely would have been embarrassing for him after claiming he would solve any cypher. But then, Poe was an unusual character. Maybe the answer lies in the cypher, which he though somebody would eventually decode.

[AcidFast]

A couple of notes about the cypher:

1 Most cyphers need a key to be solved. The more complex ones are nearly impossible to solve without the key, so if someone wrote a cypher, I would think that someone might leave a key hidden somewhere or some kind of clue....

2. I have looked into the subject a little bit, and some of the more complex modes of cyphering were actually invented or introduced long AFTER the Poe cypher was written. This tells me that unless this guy was way ahead of his time, or a huge genius (which I'm not ruling out, of course), then the method of encryption used cannot be THAT complex. For this reason, I think that the sheer number of symbols used (roundabout 158, I believe) is purposefully misleading, and that there must be a clue to the key somewhere.

I have noticed some aspects that stand out in the cypher without logical explanation. I think this is part of the key to solving it.

Any thoughts?

Oh, and by the way, me and araya are SO going to solve it, so don't even try......

[kitakaze]

Here is an interesting article on Early Cryptography. The author is supporting his claim that Shakespeare's Sonnets were written by Bacon, which is interesting on its own, but it has a really good history on cryptography techniques.

http://home.earthlink.net/~tleary/history.html

Kaze

[This message has been edited by kitakaze (edited 03-20-2000).]

[kitakaze]

I've been doing a lot of reading in the last few days on cryptography, and one of the original experts in 'cyphars' was Francis Bacon.

I would expect that Poe would have been very familiar with Bacon's work.

Bacon advocated inserting nulls into the cyphers (characters designed to throw off the decrypter, by not mapping to anything).

He also discussed using differences in characters to distinguish whether they were part of the code or not.

The 'Poe letter' certainly could fit that bill.

Kaze

[Wonko the Sane]

It wouldn't be particularly hard to write a program to test this. Just type out the cryptogram representing characters with integers. Read it in to the file and randomly replace them with different letters. Have it check it against a dictionary and if at least say 70% of the words fit, output the result to a file. Also have it check for words backwards and in a few general arithmatic progressions. What would make this sadistic is if this is encrypted by character shift AND replacements.