Poe puzzle solved after 150 years

[Jim Choate]

Talk about a double-standard...

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On Thu, 30 Nov 2000, R. A. Hettinga wrote:

> http://www.nandotimes.com/noframes/story/0,2107,500285318-500450084-502935451-0,00.html
> 
> 
> 
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> Code breakers believe Poe puzzle solved after 150 years
> 
> 
> 
> 
> *	Text of Poe's messages
> 
> 
> By JEFF DONN, Associated Press
> 
> WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. (November 30, 2000 3:51 p.m. EST
> http://www.nandotimes.com) - Edgar Allan Poe, master of the mysterious and
> the macabre, may have uttered his last words from beyond the grave.
> 
> A coded message published by Poe in 1841 in a magazine where he worked as
> editor has been deciphered with the help of modern computing and the
> intuition of a young puzzle solver, 151 years after Poe's death.
> 
> As it turns out, the translated passage wasn't Poe's message for readers
> yet unborn or a key to comprehending his enigmatic stories. In fact, the
> passage is so inept and sentimental he probably didn't write it all. But
> the mystery of whether he selected and encoded the passage remains.
> 
> It was one of two encoded texts that Poe presented as the work of a "Mr.
> W.B. Tyler," challenging readers to break their codes.
> 
> No one did -- maybe no one cared to -- until scholars, in recent years,
> began embracing the theory that Poe himself came up with the messages and
> devised the codes.
> 
> The theory holds that Poe, obsessed with death and premature burial in "The
> Tell-tale Heart" and other stories, would have encrypted his own words in
> nearly impenetrable code meant to be pried open only long after his death.
> 
> In 1992, Duke University doctoral student Terence Whalen, while
> procrastinating on his dissertation, finally decoded the first message. It
> was a passage from the 1713 play "Cato" by English writer Joseph Addison.
> 
> But it took computer power and more time to fathom the second.
> 
> "I can't really say if I cared what it would say, one way or the other. But
> I was curious to see what it would yield," said Gil Broza, a 27-year-old
> computer programmer from Toronto who cracked the code.
> 
> For his solution, he was awarded $2,500 in October by Williams College, in
> Williamstown. Shawn Rosenheim, a Poe scholar there who had pondered the
> problem for years, established the contest in 1996.
> 
> The two texts were much like complex versions of today's newspaper
> cryptograms. In Poe's time, they were often called "ciphers."
> 
> The first cipher put the original message backward. But its solution took
> just a few days, because each letter in the original message matches just
> one other letter in the code.
> 
> The second cipher is far more complex. Each letter in the original has
> multiple variants. The letter "e," for example, has 14. The code freely
> mixes upper and lower case and turns some characters upside down.
> 
> It is also maddeningly brief -- fewer than 150 words -- and so a discovered
> letter may provide clues to few words. It is also littered with what appear
> to be typographical errors.
> 
> Rosenheim and many others tried to solve it and failed. The breakthrough
> came when Broza decided, in traditional deciphering technique, to assume
> that each three-letter code word could represent "the," "and," or "not" and
> to play with the possibilities. With a computer program of his own design,
> he scanned lists of phrases showing the same patterns of letters.
> 
> He finally identified four letters in one word and conjectured correctly,
> like a contestant on "Wheel of Fortune," that it was "afternoon." That gave
> him yet more letters to decode more words and ultimately the whole text,
> within two months of work.
> 
> The deciphered message is a treacly passage wholly unlike Poe's work, with
> references to sultry breezes, amorous zephyrs and delicious languor.
> 
> "I can't imagine Poe would have taken the trouble to construct an elaborate
> cryptogram to disguise something this banal," said J. Gerald Kennedy, a Poe
> expert at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge.
> 
> On the other hand, Poe was a prankster who used to write anonymous reviews
> of his own work, accusing himself of plagiarism. Some believe Poe chose the
> name Tyler to tweak President John Tyler, whose administration had passed
> over the chronically broke Poe for a job.
> 
> In the end, the solved texts do touch on themes that preoccupied Poe, like
> immortality and enclosure, but neither appears to be the coveted message to
> posterity. They don't even indicate definitively if Poe encoded them.
> 
> "I spent years of my life on this," Rosenheim said this week. "But I might
> be wrong."
> 
> "You can make an argument one way or another," said Whalen, now at the
> University of Illinois in Chicago.
> 
> "That's just like Poe -- and just like life," he added. "There's always
> another question."
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> R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
> "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
> [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
> experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
>