back
13 comments
A bit anticlimactic.

TL;DR: A book published 500 years ago contained an obscure message. It wasn't actually "encryped" by modern standards, it was simply as encoded similar to ASCII (i.e. each number represents a character). The numbers were assigned characters in reverse alphabetical order. Converting them to letters again, you get random sentences. No hidden knowlege.

The more interesting part is perhaps that three people discovered it over the years, independently of each other. The first one actually encoded (encrypted? There is nothing said about the method) the solution so nobody could actually check whether he cracked it. More recently two other people also solved it and verified that the previous person also cracked it and wasn't talking nonsense.

I found it interesting that three people cracked the code independently: Dr. Ernst, in 1996, Dr. Reeds, in 1998, and Heidel, in 1676. But Heidel's work wasn't understood because he encrypted it, and Ernst's work was overlooked because it was published in an obscure journal.

Dr. Reeds' unique contribution wasn't in solving the problem, but in communicating the solution in an accessible way. A lot of successful companies have been the same way -- they might not have been the first ones to solve a problem, but they brought their solution to the masses effectively and accessibly.

It's not about who first discovers or invents something, but about who does it last. Ie who communicates so well that afterwards no one else has to go and discover it on their own.
The relevance (to Nash's death): "Books one and two were clearly systems for encoding messages and were the first books written on cryptography, Dr. Reeds said." Very interesting if true.

The joke:

  Trithemius offered plenty of hints, Dr. Reeds said. "He says that
  there are elaborate calculations that you have to do, and he tells you
  that you have to read the tables," he said. When Trithemius said that
  people can send messages without using letters he probably just meant
  they could use number codes instead.
Here's the article describing the solution:

Reeds, Jim. "Solved: the ciphers in book III of Trithemius's steganographia." Cryptologia 22.4 (1998): 291-317 http://profs.sci.univr.it/~giaco/download/Watermarking-Obfus...

The cipher used in book III is very simple, however. Throw out null values, reduce modulo 25, and map in reverse alphabetical order to Latin letters. The first two books of the Steganographia contain a "mind numbing variety" of other encoding methods.

Who says the Germans have no sense of humor ?
everyone but the germans.
I don't get it. Is the book a box which contains a box full of garbage?
Seems pretty useful for me. The first couple books were how to write in code. The last book was an example or writing in code. The first code was just a basic letter test. When writing LCD drivers the first thing I do is output color bars, very useful for making sure everything is working.

The second code was a demonstration of how you could have a messenger carry something that they don't know about. It said the bearer is a thief. This is pretty much what modern internet commerce is based on. Communicating in code (SSL) with messengers that internet routers in between can't read (credit card details, etc.).

The third code was Christian prayer, which proved the demonology plain text wasn't something he really supported. The demonology plain text was what made it popular and passed on, however, so even that was useful in that if the book was just all encoded numbers, no one would have printed it.

So the box wasn't garbage and the contents weren't garbage. What makes you think they were?

Maybe I did not get the text right but it seemed that he wrote some encryption algorithm and encrypted the text with the brown fox which is meaningless.
totally offtopic, but isn't german really english...from like 5 thousand years ago?
Only in the same sense that you are your cousin.

English and German are both West Germanic languages, but English has had a lot of influence from French, and to a lesser extent from the Celtic and Brythonic languages. German has undergone its own separate evolutionary history.

As much as English is German from 5000 years ago...

Actually, the ancestor of the English language was most probably brought to Britain by Germanic people from what nowadays would be the region between Netherlands and north west Germany.

Plus, it wasn't 5000, but maybe about 3000 years ago.

It was only about 1600 years ago. Plus the region where the Saxons, Angles, Jutes and Frisians lived was quite a lot bigger. From the north of the Netherlands up to northern Denmark. You can still see the similarities when you compare High German, Low German, Frisian and English words.