decipherment

The rest of the article, at least, seems ok in that it talks about her working on decipherment of the Naval codes which is true, I believe. I do appreciate your sentiment though.

Things like the decipherment of Linear B are probably what come close to classic code breaking. With AES etc, though, building a system that uses them effectively is the core principle of modern security and crypto.

Reading about the decipherment, one cannot help but realize how much effort these people put into maintaining what we would do with a simple mailing list or a Usenet newsgroup.

From what I know about the problem, his assertion that Ventris worked alone is not quite right, Alice Kober contributed significantly to the decipherment as well.

> As an counter example, consider how the decipherment of the mayan written language was performed That is no counterexample. The Mayan written language was related to a number of surviving languages, making decipherment easier.

If your algorithm and key space are sufficient to prevent decipherment before the heat death of the universe, the two months it takes to reverse engineer the protocol are as close to zero as makes no difference.

If a "t" is seen in the ciphertext of a transposition cipher, the cryptographer naturally looks for letters often on one side or the other of "t" and makes sample decipherment of the ciphertext based on the possibilities. Seeing a "q" often leads right away to a fruitful path to decrypting a simple transposition cipher.

, whereas almost every real-world decipherment has needed something like one. The only exception I can think of is Linear B; I've always thought it'd be a fascinating exercise to repeat Ventris' painstaking cataloguing and cross-referencing on a computer to see if his breakthrough could be repeated more quickly, or automatically.

Newton seeks this decipherment, or interpretation, by means of his sharp systematic thinking grounded on the careful use of all the sources at his disposal. While the formative development of Newton’s lasting physics works must remain shrouded in darkness, because Newton apparently destroyed his preparatory works, we do have in this domain of his works on the Bible drafts and their repeated modification; these mostly unpublished writings therefore allow a highly interesting insight into the mental workshop of this unique thinker.

Deciphering Mesopotamian tablets included some experiments in which different people were given the same text to translate, and their agreement on the meaning was taken as evidence that the decipherment was more or less valid. As long as there's enough Linear B material that we don't need to assume everyone in the field will be familiar with every extant text, it should be fairly straightforward to run that same experiment for Linear B, which would pretty well settle the "the character mapping is so incredibly loose that you can translate Greek from any random collocation of linear B characters" issue.

There are serious problems with the Linear B decipherment from a cryptographical standpoint and a Greek standpoint. Ventris' matrix method was impossible, first of all. It didn't come close to reaching the actual search space. And the character mapping is so incredibly loose that you can translate Greek from any random collocation of linear B characters. Some of the words that Chadwick and Ventris pulled out seem to be unexpected forms for early Greek, compared to linguistic predictions. And the meaning of the texts is often fantastic compared to similar Mesopotamian tablets. My own opinion is that Ventris and Chadwick were mistaken about the decipherment, and that all of the current work on it is so much garbage.

> Early attempts at decipherment were also confounded by numerical errors and the sloppy writing of the original tablets As you would expect. Imagine writing receipt slips by hand. > Jacob Dahl believes that some of the signs are being used to indicate syllables, making these the first texts in the world to use a syllabary. Well "some" here means "not many". Probably names. The reason that decipherment of Proto-Elamite stalled is not for lack of material.