Mike Is Smart <-------- !!!

A 2003 production of Elmer Rice's "The Adding Machine" by Gardner-Webb University, Boiling Springs, North Carolina USA. Notice the tombstones of E. RICE and ETAOIN SHRDLU.

But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.

-- Thornton Wilder,
The Bridge of San Luis Rey

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Mike has left a new comment on your post "jeezus h. krist, can't ANYBODY decode this dumb-as...":

OK, I just want to start off by saying, this was NOT easy. I may be just stupid, but NOT EASY. HUGE TIME SINK. That being said, here it is, for all to see:

CYPHER: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
_PLAIN: SN HUATVB W YM G FCROEILD

Blank spaces indicate letters that were not used, so they really can't be determined. So, after the decode:

butso onwes halld ieand allme moryo fthos efive willh avele ftthe earth
andwe ourse lvess hallb elove dfora while andfo rgott enbut thelo vewil
lhave beene nough allth oseim ulse soflo veret urnto thelo vetha tmade
theme venme moryi snotn ecess aryfo rlove there isala ndoft heliv ingan
dalan dofth edead andth ebrid geisl oveth eonly survi valth eonly meani
ngtho rnton wilde rtheb ridge ofsan luisr ey

Spacing and punctuation later:

But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.

-- Thornton Wilder,
The Bridge of San Luis Rey

God I hope that's right, because if it's not, there's a million monkeys somewhere screeming in agony.

* * *

You may be just stupid, but Vleeptron takes note that none of the Smart People of Earth solved this! And it's been posted and festering for every Bulgarian in Kafe Internet Sofia to try to decode since 12 October 2005!

Look -- just take it like a Sentient: You're Smart. And if Pure Born DNA Mozart Einstein Genius may be slightly wanting, to crack this sucker required you to Work Real Hard, drink a lot of Jolt Cola, and code and code and code until something good finally happened.

All the textbooks call this a "simple substitution code." Of course all the textbooks are written by PhDs in cryptography, number theory, and abstract algebra from Stanford and Bell Labs. The Vleeptron Advanced Mathematics Research Institute (VAMRI) prefers to call this kind of code a "screamingly difficult substitution code."

The Wilder passage, by the way, is perhaps my very favorite passage in all English literature, and "The Bridge of San Luis Rey" a deceptively beautiful, profound, heartbreaking little novel which I cannot recommend to everyone highly enough. Though he won several Pulitzers for fiction and drama, time hasn't been kind to Wilder, and he is largely forgotten, not thought of as an American giant like Faulkner or Hemingway. The critics are wrong, he is a giant worthy of Faulkner. (Screw Hemingway, he sucked.)

But Wikipedia reports:

Philosophically, ["The Bridge of San Luis Rey"] explores the problem of evil, or the question, of why unfortunate events occur to people who seem "innocent" or "undeserving."

It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1928, and in 1998 it was selected by the editorial board of the American Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of the twentieth century. The book was quoted by British Prime Minister Tony Blair during the memorial service for victims of the September 11 attacks in 2001. Since then its popularity has grown enormously.

So like did the Edgar Allan Poe and "Gold Bug" hints point you to Poe's amazing discovery of the frequency of alphabet letters in ordinary English text? This only applies to English, of course, but you crack these 5-aspirin suckers by assuming that

ETAOINSHRDLU

will pretty closely follow that order of being the most used letters in the text. So if there are 38 J's but the next most common letter appears just 21 times, odds are you've found your plaintext E. Naturally the longer the piece of text, the closer it obeys Poe's Magic Law.

French: esaitnrulodmcpv
German: enirsahtduclgmobwfkzv

Poe had to cook this all up by hand and brain. Today you just crank up a computer and have it count the letters in a huge volume of text that's already waiting on-line.

Did you do it all with pencil, eraser and paper, or did you ask for a little automated help from your Silicon Friend?

"Shrdlu" is the hero of a very bleak 1923 impressionist play about the modern industrial soulless megaworkplace, "The Adding Machine," by Elmer Rice.

Mike, you're smart. Amy, Mike is smart. Live with it.

Oh, I have to add one more thing. This "simple substitution code" is of course Boy Scout Girl Scout Simple, compared to the fiendishly difficult German military Enigma code of World War II.

But the supersecret British Bletchley Park (it's a museum now, about equidistant from Cambridge and Oxford) team of codebreakers, led by Computer Superguru Alan Mathison Turing, did not rely entirely on brilliant mathematicians to crack the Enigma code so Winston Churchill could eavesdrop on the Nazis' secret communications, often within 24 hours of radio intercepts.

Bletchley Park also used women and men who were good, clever, witty with words, with acrostic puzzles, with crossword puzzles, with jumbles, people who wrote funny witty poetry with anagrams and palindromes, etc. Because when cyphertext is a blank wall, codebreakers try to guess how a typical German military communique would begin. The German military cooperated; all Enigma messages went out in a standardized, identical, predictable way, which gave Bletchley's "word wits" an important first illumination into decoding the whole message.

For the rest, Turing and his associates just invented and built the world's first high-speed electronic (vacuum-tube/valve) digital computer that could zip through something like 10,000 possible keys per hour. They used the original design of Polish mathematicians for their smaller, electromechanical decoding machines called "bombes," because they ticked away like ticking time bombs.

When the United States military had a screaming need to break codes as World War II loomed, the core group of codebreakers were a society of amateur Word Puzzle enthusiasts from the Midwest, who had for decades been analyzing Shakespeare's plays to prove the author was really Christopher Marlowe or Francis Bacon. Their amateur word game and language skills were enough to rise to the national crisis and crack the Japanese Purple code in time to win the Battle of Midway and the rest of the major sea battles of the Pacific.

Cracking the Enigma codes protected Allied supply convoys in the North Atlantic from German U-Boot wolfpacks. Bletchley Park steered the convoys away from the wolfpacks.