14 The seventy-year old secret of the Somerton code
M R G O A B A B D
M T B I M P A N E T P
M L I A B O A I A Q C
I T T M T S A M S T G A B
In every line consisting of over seven letters, the seventh letter is an A.
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If that was the case, would you expect the working out to be visible? Some indication that a count was done?
In fact, why – if it was a puzzle – is the puzzle in handwriting, not printed?
All in all, what’s written down here looks more like an answer than a question, a solution more than a puzzle.
That’s not to say you’re not on to something with the pattern. Is Nick aware of any similar patterns used in cryptography?
I assume you’re taking the piss on the 3rd one, or am I misunderstanding it?
If you choose any sequence and choose a starting point, then if you iterate over the length of the sequence (presumably wrapping back to the beginning as you run off the end) then you will always end up at the letter before the one you started at.
If you mean even if you wrapping onto the next line, then it’s a combination of the above and the fact that the A is in a fixed position.
Make of it what you will, MyName, but for the FIRST TIME EVAH we have found what binds the code together.
I suspect you have never been asked to complete an IQ test as this little puzzle serves that purpose perfectly. Try it on someone, see if they are as clever as you are.
Number two looks interesting and worthy of some attention. Pete, yes I think it could have been some sort of 1940s newspaper puzzle – a find the sequence type puzzle.
Regarding the point formerly known as #3 being a result of ‘A’ being 7th (and adding to nickpelling’s eloquent dismissal of it):
Suppose you have a 12-letter sequence ABCDEFGHIJKL we can see that ‘G’ is 7th.
Rather than using modulo arithmetic, we’ll put the sequence in twice – I hope you’ll trust me it’s equivalent.
Now if we call ‘G’ 1 and count to 12 in the sequence from there you find yourself at ‘F’.
In fact, if instead of starting at the 7th,we start at the second (‘B’) you see that we still end up at the character before. Now change the sequence to ABCDE, rinse and repeat.
No matter the length of the sequence, or where you begin, if you count the length of the sequence you will always end up on the character before you started. I don’t want to sound like a condescending numpty – after all, as you point out, I’ve never passed an IQ test – but it actually seems quite obvious when you consider that if you start at the beginning you reach the end.
But in other news, not sure about LOTE but the letter ‘A’ as an initial is not very common – in fact according to Wiki, it’s 17th most common initial in texts, and 7th if we just look at a dictionary (note: ‘E’ would be 13th and 12th respectively under this criteria) – compared to 3rd most common anywhere withn a text. On that basis it seems to appear on this page WAY too often for an acronym English text.
The same page also talks about letter frequencies in other languages – noting these frequencies don’t take into account the letter position, (so a similar change to ‘E’s prominence from first to thirteenth is possible) Portugese, (Esperanto), Turkish, Polish, icelandic, Finnish and Czech all apparently have ‘A’ as the most common letter. Of those, there is no ‘Q’ in Icelandic or Turkishh alphabets. Poles and Czechs only use it for loanwords, Finns rarely use it other than in foreign proper nouns,
So has anyone got a Portugese translation for the Rubaiyat (or for shits and giggles, an Esperanto one)?
All good, Myname .. everything understood. But now I’ve gone back to the secret message routine, based on what could be distinct signals in the code text. Being that regardless of the number of letters in the line – 9,11 or 13 – the letter A is in a constant position.
What you may not know is that I have a library of well-read espionage literature, truth and fiction, been reading it for over fifty years and throughout have marvelled at the methods used by spies of all nationalities together with the intricate schemes they used to both aut