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Science Friday: Codes, Puzzles, and Cryptograms

Real life (mostly) codes, puzzles and cryptograms reminiscent of those used in movies like the Da Vinci Code or National Treasure. 1st, is a sculpture in front of CIA headquarters. The 2nd, is a list of 4, including the enigmatic Voynich Manuscript. The 3rd, is the Thomas Beale Cipher which sounds fictitious, but, still fun. And Lastly, is The Collatz Conjecture, which is a mathematical puzzle that may have been proven true

Watch the full episode. See more NOVA scienceNOW.


Kryptos

    The most enigmatic of all codes in the most clandestine of all places has yet to be fully broken. "Kryptos," a coded sculpture in the courtyard of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, contains a long string of seemingly nonsensical letters that conceal a message devised by sculptor James Sanborn. Some portions have been deciphered, but the last bit remains a mystery. Solutions anyone?

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/kryptos.html



How Cryptic: 4 Famous Unsolved Ciphers and Codes

    People love a good mystery, and few things are more mysterious than a long-unsolved code. Here are the stories of four ciphers and codes we’ve been unable to crack.

    [...]

      4. The Voynich Manuscript

      The Voynich Manuscript is arguably the most famous unsolved text in history. Named after Wilifred M. Voynich, the book dealer who acquired it in 1912, the 240-ish page illuminated codex contains drawings of bizarre plants, astrological maps, strange anatomical drawings, and what are possibly pharmaceutical compounds. A final section, devoid of illustration, is thought to be an almanac or list of recipes. The almanac section is the most text-dense section of the work.

      Though it has been scrutinized extensively by cryptologists and interdisciplinary groups, not a single section of the Voynich Manuscript can be satisfactorily deciphered. Certain glyphs resemble European alphabets, but largely the language remains unidentifiable. The structure of words and sentences, word repetition and frequency, and distribution of letters within words resist correlation to known languages.

      The first “solution” was offered by William Romaine Newbold in 1919, claiming the codex was authored by Roger Bacon in the 13th century. But radio carbon dating disproves this theory by showing the manuscript to be at least 200 years too young; it was likely created between 1404 and 1438. This also disproves a long-held belief that Voynich himself constructed the manuscript as an elaborate hoax to gain fame and money. Similarly, the C14 dating discounts multiple theories of other suspected authors, who mostly lived a few hundred years after the book’s creation.

      The most cryptic feature of the Voynich Manuscript, though, is the purpose. Is it a pharmacopeia? Proof of an alien encounter? The gibberish glossolalia of an insane or possessed person? Without context, satisfactory translation, and verifiable authorship, it’s just about anyone’s guess. The only certainty is that it is unique. The Voynich Manuscript is currently owned by Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, which offers the full catalog of document images on its website.

http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/89471



The Thomas Beale Cipher: A Modern Take on an Old Mystery

    It’s the stuff of legends: A group of men comea across what would be today worth $65 million in gold and silver while on expedition in early-19th-century New Mexico territory. Then, they transport said treasure thousands of miles and bury it in Virginia. One of them, named Thomas Jefferson Beale, leaves three ciphertexts, simply strings of comma-separated numbers, with an innkeeper in Virginia, who forgets about it for more than 20 years.

    One day, the innkeeper, realizing that Beale isn’t coming back, opens the box and tries to solve the riddle. Frustrated, he then tells the story and passes along the texts to a friend, J.B. Ward, who cracks one of the three ciphertexts, but not the one that actually gives the precise location of the treasure. More than a hundred years go by, and no one can solve the remaining two ciphers, not even with the benefit of modern computers, and the treasure, if it exists, may still be out there, waiting in the mountains of Virginia.

    [...]

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/02/the-thomas-beale-cipher-a-modern-take-on-an-old-mystery-2/



The Collatz conjecture may be solved after 74 years

    A long-standing and apparently simple puzzle that has left mathematicians stumped for nearly three-quarters of a century may finally be solved.

    The Collatz conjecture was proposed by Lothar Collatz in 1937. It is also known as the "3n + 1 problem" because of its deceptively-simple definition.

    Now mathematician Gerhard Opfer of the University of Hamburg, who was a student of Collatz, says he has proved the conjecture true.

    The problem starts by choosing any whole number, n. If n is even, divide it by 2. If n is odd, multiply it by 3 and add 1 to get 3n + 1. Collatz believed that if you keep repeating these operations on the resulting numbers, no matter what your starting number, the result will always reach the number 1 eventually.

    This has been verified for numbers up to 5.76 x 1018 (nearly 6 billion billion), but without a proper mathematical proof there is always the possibility that an incredibly large number could violate Collatz's rule.

    Opfer claims to have achieved this proof, which is set out in a paper on the University of Hamburg's preprint server - but the result has yet to be peer-reviewed and could prove incorrect. The paper has been submitted to the journal Mathematics of Computation for review.

    [...]

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2011/06/simple-number-puzzle-possibly.html


PS if you haven't guessed my username is a cryptogram; my last name, and devries which if you know a little French is de = of, vries = Friesland. And, More about Frisians