Contest To Crack William Gibson Poem Agrippa

An anonymous reader writes "A new cracking contest to cryptanalyse a William Gibson poem. The electronic poem ('Agrippa') was written back in 1992 and self-encrypts after being displayed once. The person who successfully cracks the encryption will win a copy of every published Gibson book." The poem/program binary was recovered in 2008, but it looks like no one has managed (bothered?) to crack the code.

Re:"win a copy of every published Gibson book"??

[realmolo]

It's true. I just re-read the "Sprawl Trilogy" in the last couple of weeks, just to see if "Count Zero" and "Mona Lisa Overdrive" were any better than I remember. They weren't. They're tedious-as-fuck.

"Neuromancer" is great, but Gibson went up his own ass after that.

Still, he wrote "Neuromancer", which gets him a lifetime pass.

Re:And when they're done here

[Frosty Piss]

Everyone seems to assume it's a "master work" simpy because nobody can understand it.

Maybe it's just a bad book?

Boring, though, isn't it?

[eyenot]

I mean, what's to stop a programmer, who isn't necessarily a heady cryptanalyst, from simply reverse-engineering the Mac application and figuring out exactly how it's done without looking at the poem itself (or the encrypted version) at all?

So, this isn't a cryptanalysis contest. It's a reverse-engineering contest. A cryptanalyst isn't given the actual encrypting mechanism, the original, and the cipher all out front and asked for an explanation. They just get the cipher and some reasonable expectation of what the original might possibly contain (the words "fuhrer" or "atom" for example).

So it's kind of boring for me -- a hobbyist with an ardent interest in cryptography -- to bother tackling the problem, when somebody with some familiarity with Macintosh machine language is going to have a severe advantage.

The contest caters to the wrong crowd and packages itself all wrong.

Re:Not encrypted

[WillAdams]

Correct.

The program was supposed to be over-writing itself w/ (randomly?) generated DNA information --- to match the DNA etchings / prints on the bundled cloth included w/ the physical original.

Re:And when they're done here

[Ubergrendle]

The difference of art over technology, is that art's definition is not binary. It changes based on personal experience, experience of exposure to the art itself, and perception of it can have its own meaning changed by evolving society and its values. Ontop of all of that, there's intricacies of language, meter, symbolism, etc that are not immediately apparentt but may be uncovered in time. In short, just because you don't understand it doesn't mean that its bad. Finnegan's Wake is not accessible to a high school english student, and it was never intended to be.