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+--- Thread: Historical ciphers, when they were introduced and their effect (/thread-4712.html)
RE: Historical ciphers, when they were introduced and their effect - kckluge - 21-05-2025
(21-05-2025, 10:36 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Just for clarity, I didn't mean hypothetical in a dismissive way. Plenty of ciphers are probably the only attestation of their exact method. But it's still interesting to note that, if it is a cipher, it swims against the tide.
In full and vehement agreement -- if it is a cipher, it is a cipher that was invented by someone looking at the problems frequency anaylsis posed for simple monoalphabetic ciphers and going off on a very different tangent than the early 15th century mainstream null & homophones class of approaches. Nick Pelling disputes that characterization of the motivation behind that class of (European) approaches (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.), but even if that's the case (and the state of the art in areas outside of Europe does need to be dug into in greater depth) it's hard to avoid concluding that the (supposed) cipher was designed to thwart frequency analysis while generating a text whose character frquency distribution looked facially (and to early 15th century eyes, essentially indistinguishable) from that of a natual language.
RE: Historical ciphers, when they were introduced and their effect - ReneZ - 22-05-2025
(21-05-2025, 10:36 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.But it's still interesting to note that, if it is a cipher, it swims against the tide.
... and all the solvers are swimming with the tide!
RE: Historical ciphers, when they were introduced and their effect - Koen G - 22-05-2025
(22-05-2025, 01:05 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.... and all the solvers are swimming with the tide!
Nowadays they rather sit in their jacuzzi and chat with their robot butler about the fish that live in its bubbling depths.
RE: Historical ciphers, when they were introduced and their effect - davidd - 22-05-2025
Book cipher (16th century attested, used by queen mary)
There is this encryption method where both parties have a copy of the same book.
The way you communicate is something like "pageno lineno wordno". encoding means looking through your copy of the book for the word you want to write.
Probably not what was used in the voynich, it works better after the invention of the printing press when people could more easily have exact copies of the same book. it is very easy with manual copying to get different linenumbers. Maybe with the bible that was already explicitly numbered.