Contest To Crack William Gibson Poem Agrippa 102
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.
No need for new infrastructure (Score:4, Interesting)
No need for new infrastructure, just post it as a project euler problem and when you "win" the blog/psuedowiki thing has a link to the torrent file for a collection of his books... I've uh, heard, that such a torrent exists.
Seriously though I've also heard second hand that if you really want to piss off Mr Gibson all you have to do it tell him you love his book iconic genre defining cyberpunk book "snowcrash". At least thats what I've heard. If you don't get the joke, if you ask people the name of a cyberpunk author then family feud style 90% of them will say Gibson but if you ask them their favorite cyberpunk novel a majority will say "snowcrash" which was actually written by Stephenson. I like Gibson's novels too, this is just funny how people assume the awesomest book must have been written by the awesomest author.
Re:Not encrypted (Score:5, Interesting)
A large portion of the disc (exactly 8,000 contiguous bytes) has been rewritten with only four different bytes: 0x41, 0x43, 0x47, 0x54.
Aren't those hex for ASCII characters A, C, G and T? Isn't that the same four characters that are used in DNA sequences?
Re:Not encrypted (Score:4, Interesting)
Well in that case the only question is if that "DNA" contains some other message or meaning. Each of the 6,000 DNA "bytes" can be one of 4 values. Thus each "byte" can store 2 bits of information. That's 12,000 bits of data. Assuming uppercase letters only, it takes 5 bits per letter minimum to encode text (without any compression). That only allows for 2,400 characters, which is 1/4th of the poem text.
Looking at it another way, the poem contains 1649 words. That allows for 3.6 DNA "bytes" per word (6000 / 1649), which is 6 bits of data per word. I'll round it up to 7 bits per word to be generous. That's still only 128 unique values per word, which isn't enough to encode all the unique words in the poem.
I just don't see any way to encode a 9,000 word poem into 12,000 bits of data. If the "DNA" does have meaning then it would have to be an excerpt of the poem, or additional verses that aren't in the plaintext version.
The latter has my vote. If the author really is clever, then he came up with an algorithm that takes the original poem text and converts it into "DNA" looking data, which can further be decoded into text that contains additional readable text that completes the poem. If he pulled that off then he earns some major respect.