![]() Essentially it's a keyed substitution cipher, where the key is the name and exact edition number of the book. As was the case with Thouless, whoever devises such a test will have to take into account that computer power in the future may make the science fiction of today a reality.I've seen ciphers (usually in spy drama shows) that involve taking a book and writing down an index to individual characters. In the present day, quantum computing threatens to make many current encryption algorithms obsolete.Īny future similar tests of “survival” will require the use of some kind of encryption algorithm that is immune to technological advances. ![]() Will superfast 'quantum' computers mean the end of unbreakable encryption?ĭue to the growth in computer speed, storage and networking capability, breaking Passage II became feasible. Naturally, Gillogly tried the text of Black Beauty as the source book for Passage II, without success.Ĭommenting on Gillogly’s 1995 solution, a Society for Psychical Research spokesperson said: “When Thouless devised the test in the late 1940s he could hardly have foreseen the future power of computers.” The keywords were “Black Beauty” from the 1877 Anna Sewell novel. Gillogly solved it in 1995, publishing an article in “ Cryptologia” with Larry Harnisch. In 1949 Thouless produced Passage III using a double Playfair technique with two English keywords instead of one. Solving this was an impressive feat of cryptanalysis in the pre-computer age, and neither the solver nor the method used is known. The keyword was “SURPRISE”, with the plain text coming from Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Thouless’s Passage I used the well-known Playfair cipher which was quickly solved after being made. In the current age of Project Gutenberg and networked computer systems, Passage II could not have remained unsolved for long. The most famous example of a book cipher is the Beale ciphers of 1885, which purport to describe the location of hidden treasure in the United States. The lesson from this discovery is that book ciphers can still be a very secure way of encrypting text if the key text can be kept secret, as the only method of solution is to exhaustively test all texts. This is a most appropriate text to reflect Thouless’ religious beliefs, as it is a famous Christian poem. I wrote a program to check all 37,000 of the English books, using my table of letter frequencies to then score the output text for a solution to Passage II.Īfter a few days, I found the source book was “The Hound of Heaven” by Francis Thompson, entered into Project Gutenberg in July 1998. I used the books of Project Gutenberg - a large collection of books scanned or typed by volunteers as the input texts. In August 2019, I produced a table of English letter frequencies in a successful attempt to break an unsolved cipher of the Irish Republican Army, presented in a 2008 book co-authored by California computer scientist James J. Passage II used a book cipher - a code in which the key comes from some aspect of a book or another text. He published two ciphers in this paper, which he called Passages. So in his seminal paper “ A Test of Survival”, Thouless turned to cryptography as a source of experiments. A disadvantage here was that the package could only be opened once to check an answer. ![]() One test involved an object or message to be sealed in a package so after the author’s death mediums could attempt to describe what was inside. He considered different ways to create an experiment which could test for survival after death. The word was used to describe all phenomena of “telepathy”, “clairvoyance”, “precognition” or “extrasensory perception” that could be tested or described.Ĭicada 3301: the mystery keeping cryptologists awake at night In the course of his academic work at Cambridge, Thouless devised experiments to test claimants for evidence of “psi” - a term he introduced in his 1942 paper “ Experiments on Paranormal Guessing”. Robert Thouless’s son David Thouless (pictured) won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2016.
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