Two Centuries On, a Cryptologist Cracks a Presidential Code

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124648494429082661.html

by sharksandwich • 17 years ago

71 11 17 years ago

online.wsj.com

pmjordan2• 17 years ago

I'm no crypto expert, but I'm guessing nobody had previously cracked it because they hadn't really tried. By today's standards at least, it seems relatively straighforward.

I love how obviously human-generated the key is: "13, 34, 57, 65, 22, 78, 49." - the differences between the two digits are almost all 0, 1 or 2. As a species, we must really resent random numbers.

michael_dorfman3• 17 years ago

True, but 200 years ago random numbers were harder to come by.

tetha• 17 years ago

You think they did not have some D10 and some D20? :)

pmjordan2• 17 years ago

As indicated by tetha's comment, that's not really true. Nature is a pretty good RNG. I was more amazed that someone who seems to have taken a keen interest in cryptography would not be concerned with generating good keys. Maybe I should expect that of someone who lived 200 years ago. I don't know.

(yes, the numbers could of course be truly random, but they don't seem it to me)

torressr3• 17 years ago

Random numbers are hard to generate even for computer, they have to based them on the system clock to generate a seed for a semi-random sequence.

So predictions of those sequences are not unheard of.

Truly random sequences are not has easy to get has it sounds :S

Two Centuries On, a Cryptologist Cracks a Presidential Code

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