89, 263, 201, 500, 337, 480 | Hacker News Reader

89, 263, 201, 500, 337, 480

damninteresting.com

122 pointsca98am7934 comments

"Indeed, the name Thomas Jefferson Beale suggests an inside joke. Thomas Jefferson was, of course, the author of the Declaration of Independence, the very document Ward claimed to have stumbled upon "by accident" (in his words) as the key to the cipher. The name Beale suggests Edward Fitzgerald Beale, who became famous when he crossed what was then Mexican territory in disguise to transport the first samples of California gold from the west to the east, 37 years before Ward's book."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Fitzgerald_Beale

"In the late 1850s, Beale surveyed and built Beale's Wagon Road, which many settlers used to move to the West, and which became part of Route 66 and the route for the Transcontinental railroad."

Sounds like today naming the author of the code "Michael Jackson Gates" and giving for the second key the lyrics of "Beat it"?

But the wish for treasure was blinder. Skeptoid concludes:

"After (the pamphlet's) publication, Ward tried to downplay the tale, claiming that all remaining copies of the pamphlet had been destroyed in a print shop fire, despite researchers finding no newspaper records of any such fire. Only the first few pamphlets ever got out, and once they did, it appears that Ward realized he'd created a monster with a greater effect than he'd anticipated. Ward had been friends with the Buford and Morriss families, and it's perhaps most probable that the unexpected attention changed his mind about promoting his fictional story at the expense of his friends."

But the wish is warmed up again and again.

Now checking the sources (ha!) the transcript of the original book has only "Thomas J. Beale" and nowhere Jefferson. Bad, bad Skeptoid! The transcript here appears to match the images of the book (in the second link) except for the Declaration, which doesn't match the one in the book (the numbering in the book has the same numbering for two ten word runs, and that is apparently necessary for the correct decoding):

http://www.unmuseum.org/bealepap.htm

So if the joke exists it's not so obvious as Skeptoid writes, we just have Thomas J. and the Declaration of Independence in the book.

Still the conclusion that using the known key for 2 on the code 1 gives the substrings "abbbccccdde" and "abcdefghiijklmmnoh" seems symptomatic:

http://rogergrambihler.tripod.com/BealeHoax.htm (a)

( (a) nicely fitting for the subject, the investigation is on Tripod, and it still exists! Yay, Tripod!)

Incongruences in the back story? The alphabet appearing in the deciphered message? Words used before they entered the English language? The author selling his pamphlets for profit?!

Occam's four-bladed razor cuts right through my hopes of finding this treasure.

Oh yeah it's obviously a hoax. I just wonder if there is actually a message that can be decoded, or if the numbers are just random and made up.

> Hammer did not get especially far, but concluded that the patterns in the two undeciphered notes seemed to be non-random.

I wonder if there's any research into the kinds of sequences that feel random, as opposed to those that actually are. There's an old story of a stats professor who assigns students to either flip a coin 100 times or just make up a sequence of 100 heads or tails, and invariably the two are distinguishable based on, for example, run lengths. Similarly, I could imagine that "Beale" just made up numbers, rather than randomizing them well.

I don't know about anyone else here but it sounds like a nominally legal, if morally dubious, startup idea. Each month put a 'treasure' somewhere, and sell a description for $10 on how to find it, once a year do a "big" treasure ($100 ticket) for people who have participated in 6 or more of the previous months.

The barrier to entry would be the ability to make reasonably challenging ciphers. The harder the cipher the more hard core the participant, but you need to sell enough "tickets" to cover the cost of the item and operating overhead.

Sort of a variation on puzzle rooms.

Or maybe they could guess numbers and if someone guesses the right number then they win!.

So sleazy geocaching?

There would quickly be established a small number of customers who win all the prizes, and then it'd be stupid to compete against them without their tools and expertise.

Proof: That's exactly what happens with Augmented Reality Games.

(Probably why they fell out of favor as a marketing vehicle. You think you're marketing to millions, but after a couple of weeks it becomes clear you poured all this money into this bizarre marketing attempt for dozens.)

I'm glad they've fallen out of favor. Every time I come across one, it's a year after the fact and there's already a full-fledged community with a forum, mailing list, and meetups run by people who quit their day job to devote all their time to it. Talk about intimidating.

If that is the case then it is an even better idea. These folks aren't after "stuff" they are completionists with a competitive streak. That suggests that you could have something as simple as steel medallions which were the "prize" such that folks could collect them and then turn them in for other "in game" items. Sort of the Internet of Things meets Freemium gaming.

I'm talking about encryption specialists looking to sucker a poorly-equipped business into giving them easy money, not hobby gamers doing it for thrills. If you're offering thrills and game trinkets, you're looking to attract WoW and LoL players, not professional cryptologists. If they can't break your encryption, they won't stick around.

My first exposure to the Beale Ciphers was thanks to this animation short: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKMxtfMSPTM

An aside about the short:

> The film contains 16 hidden messages that hold clues to the characters' secrets. Eight are fairly easy requiring only a close eye. Six are moderately difficult using various encryption methods. Two are extremely difficult requiring a genius mind to decrypt.

To be honest, I still haven't found all of them.

This is similar to the Oak Island treasure pit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_Island

A transcription for anyone interested in crunching on this: http://cipherfoundation.org/older-ciphers/beale-papers/beale...

Did they try using Benjamin Franklin's spectacles?

I think this is particularly interesting and timely among the current calls from certain segments of US law enforcement and politicians to "ban encryption" or for vendors to add backdoors.

Indeed. If a legitimate cryptosystem had been used, with the keys held in escrow in a secure facility, the matter of authenticity could at least be resolved, even if we decided not to cheat and use the stored keys to determine the location of the treasure.

That title though.

Has anyone figured it out yet?

I tried for a while but am having trouble with the offsets (and possibly the correct edition of the DOI). The smartest way to get the offsets correct would be to copy the numbers from the image and cross reference them with the decrypted text. But who's got time for that? :)

Some Python code if anyone wants to play with it:

     words = doi.replace(',', ' ').replace('\n', ' ').replace('  ', ' ').replace(':', ' ').replace('.', ' ').replace("'", ' ').replace('"', ' ').replace(';', ' ').split(' ')
     words = filter(None, words)

     def getcode(w, i, offset):
          print w[i-offset][0],

     for code in [89, 263, 201, 500, 337, 480]:
          getcode(words, code, 0)

I used http://www.constitution.org/usdeclar.txt and deleted the header and title.

I tried that and got nothing.

The numbers and text are here: (http://cipherfoundation.org/older-ciphers/beale-papers/beale...) Credit to kencausey

I think you're probably right on your lucky guess (I see you edited it out, so I'll suppress the spoiler alert as well :)).

I was able to get something fairly close to that with variable offsets.

What text did you find it in?

I "roughly" got it using the DOI txt I linked above.

I tried again with the pre-mapped text you linked to, and got `e o a p s p` which is an anagram for `appose`... perhaps that is the word? "Appose" means "to place (something) in proximity to or juxtaposition with something else." Maybe I'm grasping at straws here...

Offset of +1 yields `b s a i t h` which is an anagram for habits.

Offset of -1 yields `a t a l b t` which is an anagram for Alt-Tab (which is roughly what I'm doing right now to get out of this :p)

I also tried all offsets within 0-7 for each character, to see if "CIPHER" could fit in that range. CI_H_R is possible but there is no P or E within +/- 7 offset of 201 or 337.

Here's the python:

    txt="""<<Pasted from http://cipherfoundation.org/older-ciphers/beale-papers/beale-papers-transcription/>>"""

    import re

    codes = txt.split(' ')
    codes = filter(None, codes)

    code2word = {}

    words = []
    for code in codes[0:-1]:
        try:
            index = re.search(re.compile(ur'\((\d+)\)'), code).group(1)
        except:
            index = index + 1

        word = code.replace('(%d)' % int(index), '')

        code2word[int(index)] = word

        print index, word

    for code in [89, 263, 201, 500, 337, 480]:
        word = code2word[code]
        print word[0],

Good luck

I was using ps to try to find it real quick: At first tried the DOI:

(Today's)

DOI (Today) 89 "by" 263 "such" 201 "all" 500 "of" 337 "to" 480 "has"

DOI (from Then) from earlier link:

89 / e 263 / o 201 / a 500 / p 337 / s 480 / p

Didn't see anything, so then I tried the article text itself. There was an "and/or" combination that I didn't know how to space so I took word X-1, X, and X+1:

89 of / two / years 263 tantalizing mystery of 201 remained / stubbornly / undechipherd 500 "American" / Dollars / I 337 locked / them /inside 480 punctuation / added, / the

89 o/t/y 263 t/m/o 201 r/s/u 500 a/d/i 337 l/t/i 480 p/a/t

Maybe that X+1 column is support to say "you d it?" Not sure. Having to divert attention now. Fun title though.

So, from the comment at the bottom of the article I played around with the article itself a little more.

If you separate the word innkeeper into two words you can get the following:

    89  years
    263 of
    201 undeciphered
    500 words
    337 inside
    480 numbers

You Win.

Don't forget to support them if you like their stuff - I just remember several posts from that site on HN:

https://www.damninteresting.com/damnload/

> ‘abfdefghiijklmmnohpp’

I'm surprised anyone had any doubts after that.

Yeah, this is one of those stories like the infamous money pit where it sounds like a real life treasure hunt at first, but when you stop and think about the details you realize that it's almost certainly a hoax.

In general burying lots of money doesn't make much sense. Most people want to, you know, buy stuff with it instead. Rugged frontiersmen weren't worrying about saving up for retirement, and it would take an enormous amount of trust in your fellow man to bury all of that money in one place and worry about one of them sneaking back and stealing it all.

Actually that's the one thing that makes me think that, hoax or not, there's something encrypted there. That string definitely has structure, indicating it was engineered, but it isn't perfectly sequential or linear, indicating that there may be undecoded information in it, perhaps another layer deeper. And why would the author go through so much trouble just to lead to nonsense cypher? Why not just skip that step?

Probably the differences from the alphabet are just mistakes. Ward meant to just encrypt the alphabet, but just copied down a couple numbers wrong, and did a couple twice.

Perhaps, but I think it equally or even more likely that it was intentional. This is someone who went through immense trouble to set up a system that is otherwise rather elaborate and detailed. Maybe he just hacked together the last bit and botched it with a ~25% error rate, or maybe there's more to the story that we've yet to figure out.

Still, didn't stop me from looking at these anagram combinations: http://wordsmith.org/anagram/anagram.cgi?anagram=abfdefghiij...

    abfdefghiijklmmnohpp
    Bank Dig He Jiff Hmm Plop

"Jiff he dig bank hmm plop."

Edit: the server offered ~3,100 combinations but it's currently under load and not allowing as long of word combinations. Just now I thought to try a Latin dictionary.

Edit 2: snapshot of the results - http://pastebin.com/BXu2RSxW

Edit 3: crummy searchable (include/exclude) version because it's Friday: http://abfdefghiijklmmnohpp.pp19dd.com/

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