(11-01-2022, 05:24 PM)pfeaster wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.So I'm unsure how to reconcile our sense that this approach shouldn't have taken a "big conceptual leap" in the early 1400s with the observation that it seems to have had so little impact on cryptological practices in general, even up to our own time. Is there some factor that militates against the development of this kind of cipher process?
The military and diplomats had no interest in making the enciphering process creative and fun. Like JKP, I believe that a family project is more likely than other possibilities, the secret was kept in a family and was never known to scholars who wrote books about the history of cryptography.