Inagural Post

It seems like I should have something monumental to say in the first post here, ahem . . .

I've got nothing.  Where to begin?  A little background perhaps.

Somehow in the past year, I've gotten sucked into the world of codes, ciphers, and secret writing.  I find it all very fascinating and I hope one day to teach my son the ins and outs of how it all works.

I must say, this all started in a very innocent manner.  I stumbled back into a childhood hobby of collecting baseball cards when I heard about "The Ginter Code".  This site walks through the solution for this particular code, but the basis of it was there were symbols, 64 or 65ish in total, printed on a subset of 100 baseball cards from this particular set.  The idea was that you'd have to hunt through the cards and figure out how to decipher the hidden message(s).

I don't think I can put into words what I learned while working on that code.  I had no background in cryptography, nor had a I read anything on the subject, and for that I was handed my defeat.  However the biggest lesson I took away from that is that you need to learn how codes and ciphers are constructed before you can learn to take them apart.

Fresh off my drubbing in the 2009 Ginter Code challenge, I spent the next year reading whatever I could get my hands on, and another blogger (in the baseball card hobby) and solver of the 2008 Ginter Code challenge pointed me to this:

That bad boy is Kryptos.  A sculpture designed by artist Jim Sanborn, with help (on the ciphers) from Ed Scheidt.

I spent many hours in 2010 learning about Kryptos, joining the Yahoo community that works toward brainstorming and solving it, and making several friends along the way.  Even more importantly, I formed what I believe was a decently well thought out theory on how the final section may have been encrypted and tested that theory with the help of some very kind individuals from the Yahoo group.  While I don't spend as much time working on Kryptos of late, anyone who's looked at that darn sculpture can't seem to let it go.  Thoughts come and go, ideas come to me in my sleep . . . anyone reading this far probably understands what I'm talking about.

There you have it, the background on ciphers and me in the past year or so.  I went so far as to design my own code also utilizing baseball cards.  It was a fun endeavor, and someone did finally solve it after a few weeks.

I wanted to start this blog as a side outlet to share my thoughts on classical ciphers, code-breaking, code-making, and also share my thoughts on a couple as-yet-unbroken ciphers out there.

My current interest lies in the D'Agapeyeff cipher.  There is not a lot of information available about this cipher, although it's gone unbroken for almost 70 years.  I've got an idea about it and that will have to be my second post here.  Here's a shot of the ciphertext.