Ars Technica’s Julian Sanchez was belatedly watching the first season of “Fringe”, and recalled a discussion by Erica Sadun of all the hidden “Easter eggs” embedded in the edit. What caught his eys in particular was a “glyph code”, a distinctive pattern of shapes that popped up just before the commercial breaks. Could he break it?
Well… Julian just happened to recall a piece of code published by David Eppstein at UC Irvine for smashing your way into any monoalphabetic substitution code given a probability-weighted wordlist. And when he tried it out on the Fringe glyphs, it yielded their secrets almost at once (despite several errors in the ciphertext fragments – it’s just like the Renaissance all over again, eh?)
OK, I still prefer the Adrenalini Brothers’ cipher. But this one is nice too, in a kind of demented pigpen kind of way. 🙂