[Blog Post] Spatial Spread And Conditional Character Entropy Reduction

[pfeaster]

I kept Voynichese glyphs for coordinates, but changed the "pick the letter at the cartesian coordinates given by the ciphertext" rule to something that may be called antipolybius: to decipher, pick Latin letters on the board at every cell on the zigzag path defined by the ciphertext stream *except* at the vertices.

Neat!  So if I'm understanding this correctly, if we were to think of this as a game like checkers, you'd read any Latin letters on the squares the gamepiece jumped over each time to get to its new position?

I could see a nice competitive game arising out of this, where players would draw cards with words from a deck and compete to see who could encipher their word in the fewest moves.  If you design it, maybe we can set up an online tournament.

This kind of cipher is great fun to try to design in general, and there seem to be a vast number of possibilities, all of which have the added advantage of seeming rather hard to crack -- not because they're particularly sophisticated compared to better-known cipher strategies, but only because they use an unexpected logic.

But whenever I pick up a history or survey of cipher techniques, it never seems to mention anything like this.  Does anyone have an explanation as to why?  I assume it must be for some reason other than that the Illuminati use it and have therefore suppressed all references to it.  (One explanation could of course be that I'm just not reading the right stuff.)