7 ms·

I thought this could be a fun 'challenge'... I'm inclined to believe that this is potentially ciphered in English, due to, what look to be stiking similarities

I thought this could be a fun 'challenge'... I'm inclined to believe that this is potentially ciphered in English, due to, what look to be stiking similarities between the alphabetic character frequencies of the notes: http://d122.com/murdermystery/freq.png http://d122.com/murdermystery/freq.png and the frequencies of characters in English: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:English_letter_frequency_(alphabetic).svg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:English_letter_frequency_(... If anyone else wants to have a play here is my (rough) transcripts and an ODS with some frequencies: http://d122.com/murdermystery/1.txt http://d122.com/murdermystery/1.txt http://d122.com/murdermystery/2.txt http://d122.com/murdermystery/2.txt http://d122.com/murdermystery/freq.ods http://d122.com/murdermystery/freq.ods I'll update here if I find anything interesting. Lots of patterns repeated in this text!

noahc 16y ago
What was your methodology for getting freq.png?
- double122 16y ago
  It's just a frequency count of the letters in the transcriptions I did. Obviously my transcript may not be perfect, but I was pretty confident with most of the letters. This was just my first observation and I thought it was interesting enough to post.
  - noahc 16y ago
    I guess, isn't it weird that nearly matches the graph for English? If each letter moved to the right 8 places closely matched the expected value of that letter that would suggest that that you would be on to something. Doesn't this point to it might be a fraud as you wouldn't expect an encrypted message to contain the exact same distribution as expected unless they just switched letters of near the same frequency around?
    - double122 16y ago
      That's a valid point. I appreciate that it may be nothing, but that won't discourage me from having a little play with it. Here's a CSV containing the frequency of all words from 2 upto 10 letters http://d122.com/murdermystery/words.csv http://d122.com/murdermystery/words.csv if anyone's interested. "rcbrnse" five times?!
      - noahc 16y ago
        I don't want to discourage you, but I just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing something. I know there are a lot of people smarter than me, and I am no expert here so I thought you might know something I don't.
        Shibalba 16y ago
        I wonder what his influences would have been around 1965...he would have been around 7. I also did catch that he is very detail oriented when it came to correcting his "mistakes".
      - adsr 16y ago
        Looking for a 7 letter word from this list: http://www.world-english.org/english500.htm http://www.world-english.org/english500.htm gives 27 hits. Could be a name as well though. I realize this might appear as unsophisticated brute force, I'm just thinking aloud really.
    - caf 16y ago
      It could just mean that it's a transposition-only cipher.
      - dandelany 16y ago
        Exactly. To clarify: a transposition cipher is one that just scrambles the letters in the plaintext according to some algorithm to get the ciphertext, which would cause you to get the same letter frequencies as the plaintext. The problem is figuring out the rules of transposition so you can reverse them to decipher. There are tons of possibilities and you can't exactly plug a corpus this large into an anagram solver... That said, the fact that there are also several repeated sections ("words") does make me wonder if it's a hoax, that's not something I'd expect to see with a transposition cipher, unless the transposition rules somehow preserved repetition in passages? Anyway, food for thought.
jcl 16y ago
I would guess that he is using "E" as a separator, since it seems to occur at almost all end-of-lines and before punctuation/numbers. And maybe the letter just before "E" has some significance, as there is only a small set of letters that appears there, with "SE" extremely frequent. It's possible that he is stripping out vowels as a kind of shorthand.
- extension 16y ago
  Indeed, if you examine the scanned notes, there are subtle gaps after most of the "E"s
- noahc 16y ago
  I wonder if he might be using a gendered language. Which would explain a high level of xE or even yxE at the end of sentences.
  - Shibalba 16y ago
    think of it like this miles is mlse to him...he writes as tho he is exhaling at the end of each word. MKSE = makes
- rabbimagus 16y ago
  The most common letters in Hungarian are e and a
TanisDLC 16y ago
I was just about to type all of this out when common sense kicked in and I decided to look through the comments. Bless you for sharing!
reduxredacted 16y ago
Excellent. I personally love this sort of thing, though I'm rarely successful. I was typing out the letters as I saw them, and I noticed that I interpreted many of your "S" as the number 5, but after looking at the way he wrote "S", it appears relatively consistent throughout the text. So letter groupings became interesting: SE - 66 matches RSE - 18 matches In the first document TFNRE appears twice. Here's my interpretation from looking at the two documents (I really wish there were seriously high resolution scans of these docs, it'd help to sort out the asterisks which I used to represent characters I couldn't reasonably identify) (M*ADMKNE#R-N-STA-KNARE) (ACSM) *TFRNENP*NSEWPBSERCBBNSENPRSEINC PRSENMRSEOPREHLDWLDNCSE(TXFLFTCXLNC*E) AL-*RPPITXLYPPIYNCBEMEKSE*C*SEPRSE WLDRCBRNSE*T*SNE*TXSE-C*SLE-CITRSEWLDNCBE ALW*PNCBETSMEL*SERLSEVRGLSNEASNWLDNCBE (NOPFSENLRENCBE)NTEGDDMNSENCURER*BR** (TEWETFRNENC**TSENCBEI*G) (FIRSEPRSEONDE71NCBE) (CDWSEPRSEONSE74NCBE) (PRTSEPRSEONERDE76NCBE) (TFNGCMSOLEMRDELUSETOTEWLD*WLD*CBE) (194WLD'SNCBE)(TRFXC) Page 2 ALPNTEGLSE-SE ERTE YLSE MTSE-CTSE-WSE-FRTSE PNRTRSEONDRSEWLDNCBE *WLDXLRCMSPNEDVLDSTSMEXL DULMT6TUNSENCBEXC (*UNSARSTENMUNARSE) KLSE-LRSTE-TRSE-MKSEN-MRSE (SAE6NSESEMRCE) NMRCBRSNEPTE2*TEWSRCBKN*E **MLSE74SPRKSE29KENO*OLE17SRTRSE 8S*LECLG*E**NUTRE*KRSEPSESHLE 6SIMTCSEHTLSENCUTCTRSNMRE 99.84S2UNEP2SENCRSEAOKTSENSKSEN*SE NSREONSEPVTSEWLDNCBE(JXORL) *NMSENRSEINRNTRNTRLERCBRNSENTSRCR*NE LSPNSENGSPSEMKSERBSENCEAVXLR HMCRENMRENCBE 1/2MUNDDLSE D-W-MIYMPL XDRX This is the sort of problem I'd like to give to my child (as Douglass Adams states throughout his books) ... no bias or formula to work with. The "Street Smart" comment struck me a bit. When I was a kid, being "Street Smart" was a compliment used in contrast to someone who is "Book Smart". Being "Book Smart" was bad. Street Smart == Application of knowledge, Book Smart == would beat you at trivial pursuit/Jeopardy, but wouldn't know what to do with that knowledge. EDIT: Ahh, half my comment was missing!
- double122 16y ago
  Ahh great, thanks for sharing. I've added a few bits to a git repo: https://github.com/d122/Murder-Mystery https://github.com/d122/Murder-Mystery Just some basic python code in there for now. I'll have a look at the differences in our transcriptions when I get back from work tomorrow, and maybe try and think of some more angles to approach this.
- Plutoniumrings 16y ago
jamesgeck0 16y ago
Your text files appear to be missing the indention that was in the original note. Any Python developer could tell you that whitespace can be extremely important. ;-)
- reduxredacted 16y ago
  When I trying to convert from hand-writing to upper-case text, I couldn't help but think about the loss of fidelity. It's an important point. It may have meant something, or it may have meant that he was writing on a piece of paper against a surface that wasn't large enough, so he had to shift the paper around (I wonder why the second page has a bunch of circles around text, while the first page does not).
  - double122 16y ago
    I love python (I did this in python): https://github.com/d122/Murder-Mystery https://github.com/d122/Murder-Mystery But you are both correct, the indentation, circling etc. may be important, but I just wanted to get the letters down initially. Start with the basics and work up!
rabbimagus 16y ago
You need to decipher the code using the Hungarian language not English. The only set of words in the entire two pages that could be translated to a meaningful English phrase is on the first line of page 2 (NOTES) The words are "SE ERTE", which means "I do not understand" in Hungarian. It is not unusual for people that speak foreign languages to intermix languages. In this case however, its placement on the first line of the "NOTES" page seems to be a "Key" to solving or "Understanding" the crypto.
- prjevara 16y ago
  I am a Hungarian and just reading the comments on this case. You are not the first one came up with the idea. Unfortunately, it didn't ring any bell in my language. 'I don't understand' is NEM ÉRTEM / NEM ERTEM in Hungarian. SE ERTE doesn't mean anything in this context. The closest thing could be NEITHER FOR HIM/HER = SE ÉRTE
Sumrbrezzz 16y ago
what about a safe or lock combination for the 99.84.52?

noahc 16y ago

What was your methodology for getting freq.png?

double122 16y ago
It's just a frequency count of the letters in the transcriptions I did. Obviously my transcript may not be perfect, but I was pretty confident with most of the letters. This was just my first observation and I thought it was interesting enough to post.
- noahc 16y ago
  I guess, isn't it weird that nearly matches the graph for English? If each letter moved to the right 8 places closely matched the expected value of that letter that would suggest that that you would be on to something. Doesn't this point to it might be a fraud as you wouldn't expect an encrypted message to contain the exact same distribution as expected unless they just switched letters of near the same frequency around?
  - double122 16y ago
    That's a valid point. I appreciate that it may be nothing, but that won't discourage me from having a little play with it. Here's a CSV containing the frequency of all words from 2 upto 10 letters http://d122.com/murdermystery/words.csv http://d122.com/murdermystery/words.csv if anyone's interested. "rcbrnse" five times?!
    - noahc 16y ago
      I don't want to discourage you, but I just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing something. I know there are a lot of people smarter than me, and I am no expert here so I thought you might know something I don't.
      - Shibalba 16y ago
        I wonder what his influences would have been around 1965...he would have been around 7. I also did catch that he is very detail oriented when it came to correcting his "mistakes".
    - adsr 16y ago
      Looking for a 7 letter word from this list: http://www.world-english.org/english500.htm http://www.world-english.org/english500.htm gives 27 hits. Could be a name as well though. I realize this might appear as unsophisticated brute force, I'm just thinking aloud really.
  - caf 16y ago
    It could just mean that it's a transposition-only cipher.
    - dandelany 16y ago
      Exactly. To clarify: a transposition cipher is one that just scrambles the letters in the plaintext according to some algorithm to get the ciphertext, which would cause you to get the same letter frequencies as the plaintext. The problem is figuring out the rules of transposition so you can reverse them to decipher. There are tons of possibilities and you can't exactly plug a corpus this large into an anagram solver... That said, the fact that there are also several repeated sections ("words") does make me wonder if it's a hoax, that's not something I'd expect to see with a transposition cipher, unless the transposition rules somehow preserved repetition in passages? Anyway, food for thought.

jcl 16y ago

I would guess that he is using "E" as a separator, since it seems to occur at almost all end-of-lines and before punctuation/numbers. And maybe the letter just before "E" has some significance, as there is only a small set of letters that appears there, with "SE" extremely frequent. It's possible that he is stripping out vowels as a kind of shorthand.

extension 16y ago
Indeed, if you examine the scanned notes, there are subtle gaps after most of the "E"s
noahc 16y ago
I wonder if he might be using a gendered language. Which would explain a high level of xE or even yxE at the end of sentences.
- Shibalba 16y ago
  think of it like this miles is mlse to him...he writes as tho he is exhaling at the end of each word. MKSE = makes
rabbimagus 16y ago
The most common letters in Hungarian are e and a

TanisDLC 16y ago

I was just about to type all of this out when common sense kicked in and I decided to look through the comments. Bless you for sharing!

reduxredacted 16y ago

Excellent. I personally love this sort of thing, though I'm rarely successful. I was typing out the letters as I saw them, and I noticed that I interpreted many of your "S" as the number 5, but after looking at the way he wrote "S", it appears relatively consistent throughout the text. So letter groupings became interesting: SE - 66 matches RSE - 18 matches In the first document TFNRE appears twice. Here's my interpretation from looking at the two documents (I really wish there were seriously high resolution scans of these docs, it'd help to sort out the asterisks which I used to represent characters I couldn't reasonably identify) (M*ADMKNE#R-N-STA-KNARE) (ACSM) *TFRNENP*NSEWPBSERCBBNSENPRSEINC PRSENMRSEOPREHLDWLDNCSE(TXFLFTCXLNC*E) AL-*RPPITXLYPPIYNCBEMEKSE*C*SEPRSE WLDRCBRNSE*T*SNE*TXSE-C*SLE-CITRSEWLDNCBE ALW*PNCBETSMEL*SERLSEVRGLSNEASNWLDNCBE (NOPFSENLRENCBE)NTEGDDMNSENCURER*BR** (TEWETFRNENC**TSENCBEI*G) (FIRSEPRSEONDE71NCBE) (CDWSEPRSEONSE74NCBE) (PRTSEPRSEONERDE76NCBE) (TFNGCMSOLEMRDELUSETOTEWLD*WLD*CBE) (194WLD'SNCBE)(TRFXC) Page 2 ALPNTEGLSE-SE ERTE YLSE MTSE-CTSE-WSE-FRTSE PNRTRSEONDRSEWLDNCBE *WLDXLRCMSPNEDVLDSTSMEXL DULMT6TUNSENCBEXC (*UNSARSTENMUNARSE) KLSE-LRSTE-TRSE-MKSEN-MRSE (SAE6NSESEMRCE) NMRCBRSNEPTE2*TEWSRCBKN*E **MLSE74SPRKSE29KENO*OLE17SRTRSE 8S*LECLG*E**NUTRE*KRSEPSESHLE 6SIMTCSEHTLSENCUTCTRSNMRE 99.84S2UNEP2SENCRSEAOKTSENSKSEN*SE NSREONSEPVTSEWLDNCBE(JXORL) *NMSENRSEINRNTRNTRLERCBRNSENTSRCR*NE LSPNSENGSPSEMKSERBSENCEAVXLR HMCRENMRENCBE 1/2MUNDDLSE D-W-MIYMPL XDRX This is the sort of problem I'd like to give to my child (as Douglass Adams states throughout his books) ... no bias or formula to work with. The "Street Smart" comment struck me a bit. When I was a kid, being "Street Smart" was a compliment used in contrast to someone who is "Book Smart". Being "Book Smart" was bad. Street Smart == Application of knowledge, Book Smart == would beat you at trivial pursuit/Jeopardy, but wouldn't know what to do with that knowledge. EDIT: Ahh, half my comment was missing!

double122 16y ago
Ahh great, thanks for sharing. I've added a few bits to a git repo: https://github.com/d122/Murder-Mystery https://github.com/d122/Murder-Mystery Just some basic python code in there for now. I'll have a look at the differences in our transcriptions when I get back from work tomorrow, and maybe try and think of some more angles to approach this.
Plutoniumrings 16y ago

jamesgeck0 16y ago

Your text files appear to be missing the indention that was in the original note. Any Python developer could tell you that whitespace can be extremely important. ;-)

reduxredacted 16y ago
When I trying to convert from hand-writing to upper-case text, I couldn't help but think about the loss of fidelity. It's an important point. It may have meant something, or it may have meant that he was writing on a piece of paper against a surface that wasn't large enough, so he had to shift the paper around (I wonder why the second page has a bunch of circles around text, while the first page does not).
- double122 16y ago
  I love python (I did this in python): https://github.com/d122/Murder-Mystery https://github.com/d122/Murder-Mystery But you are both correct, the indentation, circling etc. may be important, but I just wanted to get the letters down initially. Start with the basics and work up!

rabbimagus 16y ago

You need to decipher the code using the Hungarian language not English. The only set of words in the entire two pages that could be translated to a meaningful English phrase is on the first line of page 2 (NOTES) The words are "SE ERTE", which means "I do not understand" in Hungarian. It is not unusual for people that speak foreign languages to intermix languages. In this case however, its placement on the first line of the "NOTES" page seems to be a "Key" to solving or "Understanding" the crypto.

prjevara 16y ago
I am a Hungarian and just reading the comments on this case. You are not the first one came up with the idea. Unfortunately, it didn't ring any bell in my language. 'I don't understand' is NEM ÉRTEM / NEM ERTEM in Hungarian. SE ERTE doesn't mean anything in this context. The closest thing could be NEITHER FOR HIM/HER = SE ÉRTE

Sumrbrezzz 16y ago

what about a safe or lock combination for the 99.84.52?