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The tell-tale cipher | page 1, 2
In any case, there remains the unsolved cryptograph. Whalen has been stymied in his efforts to decode the cipher, which contains about 150 words and very little character repetition. Once Whalen recognized that the three-character pattern of "comma-dagger-section symbol," repeated seven times, represented the word "the" in the first cryptograph, the remainder of the decoding followed fairly easily. The second cipher involves more complicated alphabetic correlations, says Whalen, making it far more challenging. Hoping to settle the question of whether Tyler was Poe, Shawn Rosenheim, who teaches at Williams College in Massachusetts, is offering $2,500 to anyone who solves the second Tyler cryptograph. "It's very likely that if it's solved we'll be able to argue convincingly that it is or isn't Poe," says Rosenheim, author of "The Cryptographic Imagination: Secret Writing From Edgar Poe to the Internet." If the decoded text falls short of containing the words "I, Edgar Allan Poe," theme and syntax could still indicate Poe is the author. "It's like a fact in a court case," says Whalen. "It would have to be argued." The cryptograph and details about the contest are available on the Web site of Bokler Software Corp., a Huntsville, Ala., company that specializes in encryption software. If the text turns out to be by Poe, it would fit into his grand scheme of speaking from the dead and be the final message from one of the greatest authors in American literature, a writer obsessed with the macabre and the transcendent power of words. "It's the ultimately condensed detective story," offers Rosenheim. "You have to be clever enough to see that there's even a story. Poe is playing a game with all his readers and so far his readers aren't winning." Or, as Poe, in the beginning of his "Shadow -- A Parable," put it:
- - - - - - - - - - - - Table Talk Sound off Related Salon stories "The Code Book" by Simon Singh A fascinating and remarkably accessible history of cryptography that ends with a $15,000 contest. Wild children Gloomy, morbid, doomed and glorious, Goth kids frighten adults, but they're part of a grand -- and essential -- tradition of outsider audacity. Deep code Neal Stephenson talks about the history of secrecy, the role of equations in art and the glory of open-source software.
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