Chris Weimer

Nazaroo, do you have any evidence for your assertions? I'd really like to know where how you came up with that idea.

Nazaroo

The key of course was to recognise that it was encased in a cipher.




The standard procedure of course in these cases is to remove all spacing, punctuation, extraneous factors such as the physical arrangement on the page. Next the cipher is fed through a series of seives, beginning with modulus 3, and working upward through the primes.

We settled here on mod 32 as the key to cracking the outer garment. This of course was expected to be simple, so that the message could be decoded quickly by its intended recipient.

Naturally a multi-layer design was chosen to create a 'random' smokescreen and prevent easy recognition by any code-breaker. Many of the key-words in the message are simply red herrings, filtered out by the legitimate receiver using a series of simple rules: In our case, any word repeated twice was to be ignored. The direction of letter order along any of the four cardinal axes is determined by simple cues such as the 'ABC' string in the upper left quadrant.

From there, the agent now possesses a set of words, only some of which will have meanings. This may be determined by as simple a rule as the day of the week or triggers as in this case with random capitalization of letters, indicating a substitution of a key-letter.

Finally, from the remaining words, the codeman must assemble a contextual message based upon certain expectations, for instance 'by land or by sea' might be a question already sent in a previous message awaiting a final confirmation.

Chris Weimer

So what does everyone think of Nazaroo's arguments?

RED DAVE

Bible Code. DaVinci Code. Maybe the Code of the West.

RED DAVE

Johann_Kaspar

Stupid answer to stupid thread.

Febble

Well, actually, the thing it most reminded me of when I first read it was the cipher message in Dorothy L. Sayer's novel The Nine Tailors, and the key turned out to be a peal of bells. Here's a bit:

Different style, but the same combination of evocative turns of phrase and overall clumsiness.

So I'll go with a cipher.

Febble

Trouble is, I'm no better at ciphers than I am at lit.crit. apparently. There seem to be 993 letters, which is 3 * 331, and 331 is a prime. So I can't even get a decent rectangular grid.

ETA: no, missed a semi-colon. Now I have 992, which looks a bit better.....

Chris Weimer

Perhaps now that we've moved into cypers, does anyone want a response to the OP? That is, another piece of the puzzle?

hatsoff

I think most of us just want to know from where it comes. I know I do.

Chris Weimer

So much of ancient literature rests upon our labor to work out the text and assign it where it belongs. This forum in part has many people claiming that they can in fact figure such things out. For the rest, it's idle chatter... Don't you want to see if you can, perhaps, actually figure it out? Fully? To see how close you get? Get things right or wrong? There's three more pieces to the puzzle, consisting of four in all. If no one wants to work with them, that's fine. Sucks, but it's ultimately no problem for me.

I'm doing this for you all. Not as a joke, but as a serious inquiry to allow us to recognize both our capabilities and limitations. Is anyone interested?