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To: Malsua
One would think that with enough computing power, you could decipher the cipher.

No, not if its a book cipher. A book cipher uses numbers like page number, line number and character number to encode text. For example 4,15,37 could mean 4th page, 15th line and 37th character. With codes like this the book in question becomes the key to solving the cipher, not unlike what cryptanalysts call a "one time pad". Without the book in question, and the specific edition of the book in question at that, you are pretty much out of luck. It says on Wikipedia that one of the three documents was decoded using a specific printed edition of the Declaration of Independence. If one were to take this seriously you'd start by checking it against old out-of-print books that were around when the cipher was written (might be a job for Google Books!) Of course there is the very large probability that this is all an old hoax.

14 posted on 09/09/2009 1:57:36 PM PDT by ICU812 (Oldtime Freeper, back from a long hiatus)
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To: ICU812; Revolting cat!
Of course there is the very large probability that this is all an old hoax.


16 posted on 09/09/2009 3:05:53 PM PDT by a fool in paradise (Kennedycare?Recall that "Animal Farm" begins with a Socialist Revolution to honor Big Major's legacy)
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To: ICU812
No, not if its a book cipher.

Well, see, that's the thing. With enough documents in there, you could try matching it up against phrases that exist and make words. You can check words, pages, whatever until some sense starts to reveal itself.

You would simply need many source documents and they'd have to be based on an educated guess.

21 posted on 09/09/2009 4:10:58 PM PDT by Malsua
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To: ICU812; Malsua
Long time FReepers have read my postings on the distributed project “Folding@Home”.

It has been 65 years since the three unencoded messages were captured, and two of three have been broken. The third still awaits discovery.

The three messages have been crunched on by a similar DC to F@H here:

http://www.bytereef.org/m4_project.html

The M4 project is just over 1/2 through the third message, which has still never been cracked.

The wiki can be found here:

http://distributedcomputinginfo.pbworks.com/M4

If your systems are running F@H 24/7 and you would like to donate a system over to M4, instructions can be found above.

22 posted on 09/09/2009 4:32:43 PM PDT by texas booster (Join FreeRepublic's Folding@Home team (Team # 36120) Cure Alzheimer's!)
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