Page 3 : Beale Ciphers Analyses
THE BEALE CIPHER: A DISSENTING OPINIONThis is concise and to the point. It reports on statistical and computer analyses. The following quotations are noteworthy:
"... the result of applying the DOI to B1. If the DOI is the wrong key, the resultant text should be a random sequence of letters drawn from the distribution of DOI initials.
There are a number of oddities in this 'decryption', but the most striking is the sequence ABFDE FGHIIJKLMMNOHPP. Note in passing that the first F is encrypted as 195 and that letter 194 of the DOI is a C. Similarly, the last H is 301, and letter 302 of the DOI is an O. ... the person who encrypted B2 made errors of this type, or about one every 33 letters. But correcting these errors is not critical to the argument. We will henceforth consider only the 14-letter monotonically increasing string DEFGH IIJKLMMNO.
... the odds against getting a sequence this long would be about 10^12 to 1."
That's 1,000,000,000,000 to 1. That is far less likely than winning the PowerBall Lottery! And another quote:
"The view of the Beale ciphers as a hoax is supported to some extent by the decrypted message of B2, which ends 'Paper number one describes the exact locality of the vault, so that no difficulty will be had in finding it.' ... Why would he waste the effort of encrypting another 87 characters of a message which would be redundant when the first paper, B1, was deciphered? When viewed as a hoax it makes perfect sense: the author wanted to sell the idea that the first document was worth reading."
Comment
This suggests that C1 is a hoax because of the statistical improbability of those strings. For many years in the 1800's, cryptographers believed that polyalphabetical substitutions were unbreakable because of the huge (26^26) number of possibilities for each letter. Then, a general solution was published in 1863.
These statistics also disagree with the analysis on Page 1, which suggests that C1 is a hoax because its numbers are random!
