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Historical ciphers, when they were introduced and their effect

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  • Historical ciphers, when they were introduced and their effect
• Historical ciphers, when they were introduced and their effect

• RE: Historical ciphers, when they were introduced and their effect

  kckluge > 21-05-2025, 11:14 PM

  (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, 01:05 AM

  (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, 06:52 AM

  (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, 01:47 PM

  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.

• RE: Historical ciphers, when they were introduced and their effect

  magnesium > 30-05-2025, 05:10 PM

  I will elaborate on this in a presentation at this year's Voynich Day—I am finalizing a preprint on the subject—but homophonic substitution ciphers can get you a long way toward Voynich-like properties if the cipher's substitution options are verbose. The fundamental tradeoff is that there must be fewer plaintext letters per VMS token, on average, than the manuscript's appearance would otherwise suggest.
  
  The homophonic substitution ciphers at use in early 15th-century Italy already show experimentation with offering both multiple substitution options per plaintext letter and elaborate "compound glyphs" that substitute for syllables / orthographic bigrams. To get even roughly VMS-like text, a cipher has to build out a more robust set of substitution options and include some procedural wrinkles, but the resulting cipher is not terribly alien in its overall construction. Consider this 1448 cipher from Meister's 1902 study of 15th-century Italian ciphers: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
  null

• RE: Historical ciphers, when they were introduced and their effect

  Rafal > 30-05-2025, 09:07 PM

  Quote:Consider this 1448 cipher from Meister's 1902 study of 15th-century Italian ciphers

  
  Your link seems not to work. I am getting the message:
  This item is not available online — Limited - search only — due to copyright restrictions

• RE: Historical ciphers, when they were introduced and their effect

  magnesium > 31-05-2025, 01:41 AM

  This link should work, as I have downloaded the PDF of the page: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

• RE: Historical ciphers, when they were introduced and their effect

  Jorge_Stolfi > 20-08-2025, 08:34 AM

  One must consider that mathematical "inventions", especially simple ones like Vigenère ciphers, are not necessarily invented once and then spread around.  Any such idea may be "invented" and lost many times before it spread wide enough to become "permanent".
  
  The Babylonians used a positional number notation, including a zero digit (and floating-point numbers) more than 3000 years ago.  The Maya invented the concept again maybe 1500 years ago. But those ideas were lost in time (mainly because of the influence of language: in Latin the number 2222 is said with four different words "duomilia ducenti viginti duo", so it was natural for the Romans to use different symbols for each of those words.)
  
  (And one does not say "I bought zero sheep" but "I did not buy any sheep", and that is why people have always considered the number zero to be an advanced concept, not even a "natural number" -- even though children can lean the meaning of "zero candies" more easily than that of "two candies"...)
  
  Most math "inventions" were probably "invented" many times and then immediately lost because the idea did not spread beyond the inventor, or maybe  a couple other people. And, in most of those cases, all records of the invention were lost, or are collecting mold in some remote library, ignored or misnderstood.
  
  The point is that one should not dismiss an encryption method just because it was not widely used in the early 1400s.  The VMS Author may have invented it, then failed to tell the world about it...
  
  (That said, I must clarify that I believe that the VMS is not encrypted at all.)
  
  All the best, --jorge

• RE: Historical ciphers, when they were introduced and their effect

  oshfdk > 20-08-2025, 09:11 AM

  (20-08-2025, 08:34 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The point is that one should not dismiss an encryption method just because it was not widely used in the early 1400s.  The VMS Author may have invented it, then failed to tell the world about it...

  
  Hard to express how much I agree with this.

• RE: Historical ciphers, when they were introduced and their effect

  ReneZ > 20-08-2025, 09:34 AM

  There is no need for a lot of speculation here. 
  
  The Voynich creator did something that nobody has done before, or at least it has not survived. We have it right in front of our eyes.
  
  One may want to call it a cipher, but if it is, he made sure to make it look more like a written language.
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