Many cryptographers consider this to be the true starting point of cracking the D’Agapeyeff Cipher. See those sequences where the same number appears three times in a row? More of them now. ![]() If you remove those double-zero pairings, you can arrange the numbers into a 14×14 pairing grid, like so: (And, to be fair, D’Agapeyeff himself wrote about null entries in the book Codes and Ciphers.) Then, they cut off the two double-zero pairings at the end - because they believe they were nulls, empty space-filling characters simply designed to fit the 5-letter groupings pattern of the original code as a way to throw off codecrackers. One result of this is the pattern that every pair has 6, 7, 8, 9, or 0 in the tens column and 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 in the ones column, which doesn’t seem like a coincidence.Īnd see those sequences where the same number appears three times in a row? Some cryptographers believe that is also not a coincidence. One of the first steps many aspiring cryptographers take is to break the numbers down into pairs instead of groups of five: When he published a starter book on cryptography - Codes and Ciphers, first edition - D’Agapeyeff included this chain of 5-digit number bundles as a final challenge for the readers to unravel. The only problem is… the creator, Alexander D’Agapeyeff, can’t remember how to decrypt it. This seemingly simple list of numbers contains a secret message. In fact, one example of this very dilemma remains one of the most famous unsolved codes and ciphers in the world: ![]() Why is it one of my favorite stories? Well, because the man in question FORGOT one of the cipher words he used to encrypt the location of his caches.Īnd it sort of unravels your master plan when you can’t remember a key element of it.Īmazingly enough, this isn’t the only example of a self-trained cryptographer who forgot how to solve his own creation. ![]() One of my all-time favorite cryptography stories comes from the book The Spy That Couldn’t Spell, a true-life espionage story about a dyslexic man who hid, then encrypted the locations of, thousands of pages of sensitive documents he had stolen from the U.S government.
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