FBI wants public help solving encrypted notes from murder mystery

Post by extension » Wed, Mar 30, 2011, 12:00 AM UTC

jcl wrote: post #40

double122 wrote: post #32

I thought this could be a fun 'challenge'... I'm inclined to believe that this is potentially ciphered in English, due to, what look to be stiking similarities between the alphabetic character frequencies of the notes: http://d122.com/murdermystery/freq.png and the frequencies of characters in English: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:English_letter_frequency_(... If anyone else wants to have a play here is my (roug…

I would guess that he is using "E" as a separator, since it seems to occur at almost all end-of-lines and before punctuation/numbers. And maybe the letter just before "E" has some significance, as there is only a small set of letters that appears there, with "SE" extremely frequent. It's possible that he is stripping out vowels as a kind of shorthand.

Post by reduxredacted » Wed, Mar 30, 2011, 12:10 AM UTC

scythe wrote: post #47

uptown wrote: post #23

Anybody have a copy of the legible characters so each of us doesn't need to transcribe the same text?

That's assuming that a copy of the legible characters wouldn't lose any of the original information -- the way words are written could matter.

Post by noahc » Wed, Mar 30, 2011, 12:20 AM UTC

double122 wrote: post #46

noahc wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess, isn't it weird that nearly matches the graph for English? If each letter moved to the right 8 places closely matched the expected value of that letter that would suggest that that you would be on to something. Doesn't this point to it might be a fraud as you wouldn't expect an encrypted message to contain the exact same distribution as expected unless they just switched letters of near the same frequency aro…

That's a valid point. I appreciate that it may be nothing, but that won't discourage me from having a little play with it. Here's a CSV containing the frequency of all words from 2 upto 10 letters http://d122.com/murdermystery/words.csv if anyone's interested. "rcbrnse" five times?!

Post by noahc » Wed, Mar 30, 2011, 12:24 AM UTC

jcl wrote: post #40

double122 wrote: post #32

I thought this could be a fun 'challenge'... I'm inclined to believe that this is potentially ciphered in English, due to, what look to be stiking similarities between the alphabetic character frequencies of the notes: http://d122.com/murdermystery/freq.png and the frequencies of characters in English: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:English_letter_frequency_(... If anyone else wants to have a play here is my (roug…

I would guess that he is using "E" as a separator, since it seems to occur at almost all end-of-lines and before punctuation/numbers. And maybe the letter just before "E" has some significance, as there is only a small set of letters that appears there, with "SE" extremely frequent. It's possible that he is stripping out vowels as a kind of shorthand.

Post by caf » Wed, Mar 30, 2011, 12:30 AM UTC

noahc wrote: post #45

double122 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just a frequency count of the letters in the transcriptions I did. Obviously my transcript may not be perfect, but I was pretty confident with most of the letters. This was just my first observation and I thought it was interesting enough to post.

I guess, isn't it weird that nearly matches the graph for English? If each letter moved to the right 8 places closely matched the expected value of that letter that would suggest that that you would be on to something. Doesn't this point to it might be a fraud as you wouldn't expect an encrypted message to contain the exact same distribution as expected unless they just switched letters of near the same frequency aro…