Cipher Mysteries

Here's a bit of fun for you that's only running for a few more days: a Voynichese-style challenge cipher courtesy of everyone's favourite hirsute cipher reclusive Tony Gaffney. Here it is (click on it for a more detailed image):- He says:- The above could almost be a ...

I've had a few recent emails from historical code-breaker Tony Gaffney concerning the Voynich Manuscript, to say that he has been hard at work examining whether Voynichese might in fact be an example of an early Baconian biliteral cipher. This is a method Francis Bacon invented of hiding messages inside other messages, by (say) choosing between two typefaces on a letter-by-letter basis - that is, ...

A fascinating email just arrived at Cipher Mansions from Tony Gaffney, our virtual cryptologer-in-residence at the British Library. While looking at BL Add. MS 39660 recently, he noticed a set of dates for ten popes written in an unusual mixture of Roman numbers and Arabic numerals ("an9 pm9" = "annus primus", and "ufq3" = "usque"):-...

I've just got back from Barcelona (more on that shortly), and have a brief thought on the VMs for you. Tony Gaffney emailed a few days ago to say that he had posted up his initial thoughts on the Voynich Manuscript to the Ancient Cryptography forum's Voynich Manuscript topic: overall, his initial code-breaker's reaction is that everyone else seems to ...

Yet another interesting comment from Rene Zandbergen yesterday (to my flying potions post) sparked off a furious flurry of bloggery here at Cipher Mystery Mansions. While browsing through a large set of online manuscripts digitized (and hosted) by the University of Heidelberg, he found Cod(ex) Pal(atinus) Germ(anicus) 597 - an alchemical manuscript where a large amount of it is written ...

By now I'm sure you're all thoroughly sick of the way I heap superlatives and laurel wreaths onto Tony Gaffney's hair-bestrewn head every time he cracks yet another of Bellaso's ciphers... and now he's broken two more, lifting his tally for the 1564 set of challenge ciphers to 6 out of 7. Though Tony dearly wants to make it 7/7, Bellaso's remaining ...

That man Tony Gaffney has been at it again, shooting yet another cryptographic tin can down off Giovan Battista Bellaso's fence: this time, it was Bellaso's 1564 challenge cipher #7's turn to fall. What was particularly sweet about #7 was that it was a completely different type of cipher to the others Tony had previously broken: rather than being some kind ...

Once upon a time (twenty years ago, back when I still had hair), I used to play for Hackney Chess Club in the London League: after most matches, the team would decamp to Brick Lane for a late night curry and a swift-ish couple of pints. Happy (if somewhat calorifically excessive) days. :-) And so it has recently been a thoroughly pleasant ...

In the 1564 printed edition of his cryptography manual, Giovan Battista Bellaso included seven challenge ciphers for his readers to break, along with a set of clues: these all remained unbroken and in obscurity until Augusto Buonafalce wrote about them in 1997, 1999, and 2006 in the journal Cryptologia. But that's all changed now! Tony Gaffney - who Cipher Mysteries regulars should remember from his ...

A huge thanks to the indefatigable Tony Gaffney who very kindly took the time recently to double-check my transcriptions (some of them derived from Augusto Buonafalce's transcriptions) of Bellaso's various challenge ciphers against the copies held in the British Library. Of the twelve corrections he suggested, roughly half were typos on my part, while the remainder were places where I had transcribed punctuation-like marks ...