200-year-old ciphers may reveal the location of treasure buried in Virginia
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Re: 200-year-old ciphers may reveal the location of treasure buried in Virginia
#2A book code. Someone could run it against every digitized book earlier than the date of the code. With enough off-peak AWS instances...
Re: 200-year-old ciphers may reveal the location of treasure buried in Virginia
#3A book code. Someone could run it against every digitized book earlier than the date of the code. With enough off-peak AWS instances...
The problem would be to define what is considered a successful outcome, measurable by an automated system.
Re: 200-year-old ciphers may reveal the location of treasure buried in Virginia
#4A book code. Someone could run it against every digitized book earlier than the date of the code. With enough off-peak AWS instances...
The problem would be to define what is considered a successful outcome, measurable by an automated system.
Indeed, even if you decode the supposedly "cracked" Beale letter, you get nearly complete gibberish:
ihaie depos otedi nthec opntt olBed oorta boupf ourmi lesfr ombul ordsi nanep caiat ionor iault sipfe stbel owthe surla csoft hhgto undth sfotl owing artic issbe aongi ngjoi otltt othep artfe swhos lnamf sateg iieti nnumb erthr ffhtt ewith
https://nibot-lab.livejournal.com/tag/beale%20ciphers
It's almost certainly a hoax.
Re: 200-year-old ciphers may reveal the location of treasure buried in Virginia
#5A book code. Someone could run it against every digitized book earlier than the date of the code. With enough off-peak AWS instances...
The problem would be to define what is considered a successful outcome, measurable by an automated system.
Wouldn't a successful outcome just be recognizable sentences?
Re: 200-year-old ciphers may reveal the location of treasure buried in Virginia
#6"As long as a key is available, a substitution cipher is a safe, simple way to encrypt a message." ...quality article
Re: 200-year-old ciphers may reveal the location of treasure buried in Virginia
#7What is point of finding it if the govt is going to claim it?
Re: 200-year-old ciphers may reveal the location of treasure buried in Virginia
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem would be to define what is considered a successful outcome, measurable by an automated system.
Indeed, even if you decode the supposedly "cracked" Beale letter, you get nearly complete gibberish: ihaie depos otedi nthec opntt olBed oorta boupf ourmi lesfr ombul ordsi nanep caiat ionor iault sipfe stbel owthe surla csoft hhgto undth sfotl owing artic issbe aongi ngjoi otltt othep artfe swhos lnamf sateg iieti nnumb erthr ffhtt ewith https://nibot-lab.livejournal.com/tag/beale%20ciphers It's almost certainly a h…
I also believe it was a hoax, but this is not a good argument for it being a hoax:
The perpetrator would expect buyers of the pamphlet to try reproduce the decoding of the second ciphertext, so presumably there were versions of the declaration that correctly formed the key.
For the edits (compared to original declaration) see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beale_ciphers#Deciphered_messa...
I would like to see a python (or other) script with the most important observations reproduced (such as the alphabet like sequence)
Re: 200-year-old ciphers may reveal the location of treasure buried in Virginia
#9A book code. Someone could run it against every digitized book earlier than the date of the code. With enough off-peak AWS instances...
The problem would be to define what is considered a successful outcome, measurable by an automated system.
There are, I dunno, maybe 1,000,000 words in the English language. With a book cipher, almost all books will produce gibberish words not on the list. If you find one for which almost all words are magically on that list of 1,000,000 words, you win.
I get the appeal of the notion that some second grader could stumble on the winning book and claim the prize, but this article is like halfway between cryptographic fantasy and reality. Google suggests there are only 130,000,000 books in existence, which would be more than easy enough to brute force if we had access to all of them. Furthermore, there is a clear success criterion. The limiting factor is that not all books have been digitized, but if the book is relatively well known, it should be.
I'm surprised someone at Google hasn't just put this whole thing to bed by now.
Re: 200-year-old ciphers may reveal the location of treasure buried in Virginia
#10What is point of finding it if the govt is going to claim it?
After black swan, it seems like big treasure hunting is close to hopeless https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Swan_Project