Codes & Ciphers

We have worked on two problems from cryptography, as tests of our methods for identifying errors in expert reasoning. Gordon has also created two cipher texts, using different principles from the usual crytography approaches.

The Voynich Manuscript

This is a book several centuries old, whose text has never been deciphered. It is richly illustrated, with a mixture of strange and ordinary-looking images. Previous researchers had assumed that the regularities in its text were too complex to have been meaningless gibberish; Gordon found a way of producing these regularities using a low tech method of generating meaningless gibberish text. The implication is that the manuscript is probably a hoax. The image below shows part of a page from the manuscript.

More about the Voynich Manuscript

The D’Agapeyeff Cipher

This is a short challenge in a 1939 book, which was an introduction to code making and code breaking. It has never been deciphered. Gordon and Gavin have published a series of blog articles about this. There are several claimed solutions by different researchers; the solutions are all different. The image below shows the cipher.

More about the D’Agapeyeff Cipher