Viewing Single Post From: Chaocipher

Viewing Single Post From: Chaocipher
cmdline	Aug 24 2008, 05:25 AM
Just registered Posts: 16 Group: Members Member #3,232 Joined: July 17, 2008	tidmiste Aug 15 2008, 02:41 AM Well, in all honesty, it says in the book that he published that it's a transposition, like it says in the Wikipedia. I've read it myself, and that's why I've got the original pages. Also, I made the Wikipedia myself. (If you don't believe me, look at the edit history. You'll see user name "TidMiste" there too! :P) The reason why the frequency distribution is weird is because, as he stated in earlier pages (which I could send you if you'd like), he uses infrequently used letters as a way of punctuation, like QQ for a period, of W for a comma. It would seem as if the distribution is weird because of added letters, right? I actually have previously read chapter 21 of "Silent Years". Where does Byrne say that it's a transposition cipher? I know that he says vague things like "chaotic disruption" of the text or "splitting the written word", and in his meeting with Marcellus Bailey, the patent attorney, Bailey said something like "you have certainly scrambled your eggs" after receiving a demonstration of the model, but I wouldn't want to conclude that it's a transposition cipher based on that. I'm aware that Byrne used certain letters for punctuation, at least for the first two of his cipher exhibits, and that this would skew the frequency distribution somewhat. However, even taking that into account, how can Exhibit 1 from the book be a simple transposition? He gives you the plaintext-ciphertext correspondence (i.e. "ALL GOOD, QUICK BROWN FOXES"...). Even accounting for the two punctuation characters in the sentence being replaced by low frequency letters, I don't see how the ciphertext can be a simple transposition of the plaintext. Take ciphertext instance #1 starting with "CLYTZ..." for example. The plaintext sentence ("ALL GOOD, QUICK...") contains four "E"s. There's only one "E" in ciphertext #1. Furthermore, if the period at the end of the plaintext sentence is replaced with "W", then there should be two "W"s in the ciphertext (the other one is from the word "BROWN"). If it's a pure transposition (i.e. rearrangement) cipher without substitution, then there should be two "W"s occurring in the ciphertext. Ciphertext #1 contains no "W"s at all. Now, certainly the cryptosystem could be a combination of transposition and substitution, but I don't see how it can be pure transposition. Edited by cmdline, Aug 24 2008, 03:56 PM.


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