"POE'S PUZZLE"
Links related to E. A. Poe's "Cryptographic Challenge"
and the recent solution of his cypher,
plus other Poe links.
jump down to:
The published cryptogram and its recent solution
E. A. Poe on the Internet
A summary and some comments from Searle Crate:
The Edgar Allan Poe Crypto Challenge-- This one has the original cryptogram (image) and the offer of %2,500, with a fair amount of background.
CIPHER SOLVED, MYSTERY REMAINS--news release from Williams College, where the establishment of a $2,500 prize by Professor Shawn Rosenheim led to the solution of the cryptogram by Gil Broza, a 27-year-old software engineer living in Toronto.
A
summary and some comments from Searle Crate:| Our Mission Statement begins: "Schreiner University is a small, primarily residential liberal arts college..." | Main Entry: liberal arts Function: noun plural Date: 14th century 1 : the medieval studies comprising the trivium and quadrivium 2 : the studies (as language, philosophy, history, literature, abstract science) in a college or university intended to provide chiefly general knowledge and to develop the general intellectual capacities (as reason and judgment) as opposed to professional or vocational skills |
I invite you to enjoy a story that reaches across mathematics and literature, cryptography and computer science, 150-year-old periodicals and the Internet, childhood introduction to ideas and adult accomplishment. You can learn how a young Canadian (Gil Broza, whose interest in Edgar Allen Poe was first sparked in high school when he read "Annabel Lee" and "The Raven" and whose interest in cryptography was furthered by reading David Kahn’s The Codebreakers) searched on the Internet for cryptographic challenges and eventually claimed the $2,500 prize offered to the first person to solve a cryptogram published over 150 years ago by E. A. Poe.
In 1985, Louis Renza of Dartmouth College suggested that two cryptograms supposedly sent to Poe by "Mr. W. B. Tyler" were in fact created by Poe himself, and might represent his last messages to us, "from beyond the grave". This idea was pursued by Shawn Rosenheim (of Williamson College) in his book The Cryptographic Imagination: Secret Writing from Edgar Poe to the Internet (Johns Hopkins, 1997).
The first of the two cryptograms was solved in 1992 by Terence Whalen. It proved--disappointingly--to be a passage from the play Cato, by Joseph Addison. With the support of Williamson College, Rosenheim established a $2,500 prize for the solution to the remaining cryptogram. In 1998, Jim Moore, a software designer specializing in encryption, built an Internet website to promote the contest, and three years later Gil Broza submitted the winning solution.
Broza wrote computer programs to carry out various kinds of analysis of the cryptogram, but eventually relied on his own perception and analysis, materially aided by computer. He found the cryptogram employed a polyalphabetic substitution cipher, carefully employed to mask the letter frequencies which would aid in its solution, and a backwards spelling of each word. The analysis was further complicated by the fact that the printed original contained numerous typesetting errors.
The final result is a disappointment to the Poe enthusiasts. Unlike the first cryptogram, no known source has been identified for the second text, yet its style casts strong doubt on the thesis that the words were written by Poe himself.
Part of what attracts me about this whole story is the intertwining of a variety of factors. I see in it an example of what humans do well, cooperating in an effort spanning more than 150 years, inspired by the personal fascinations and skills of people from widely different backgrounds, combining the technology of the Internet and computer programs with the driving force of interests as varied as literary history and mathematics.
This small event is a microcosm of most advances in culture and civilization: shared effort, diverse contributions, gradual progression of knowledge and ideas.
As a youth, Gil Broza read...
That is somewhere close to the concept of liberal arts.
---Searle