🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <2109@polya.STANFORD.EDU> haddad@polya.STANFORD.EDU (Ramsey Haddad) writes:
>
>Can anyone decrypt the following:
> 122, 151, 164, 175, 184, 203, 221, 272, 278, 287, 323, 356
>
>Some background: This sequence comes from Denning's great cryptography
>book ...    [In the running head of] pages 122, 151, [is]
>the string ``ABFDEFGHIJKLMMNOHPP''.  Surely this can't be accidental. ...
>
>First attempt: Earlier in the book, Denning discusses how the string
>``ABFDEFGHIJKLMMNOHPP'' arose in connection to the Beale Ciphers.  In
>one Beale Cipher, the number X should be replaced by the first letter
>of the Xth word of the Declaration of Independance.  Does anyone have
>an on-line version of the DOI, so that we can check if that is how to
>decrypt the above string?

As it happens, I have a copy of my 1980 Cryptologia paper, which has the
numbers I used to find the above string.  The Denning page numbers give

(fanfare, please)       122 151 164 175 184 203 221 272 278 287 323 356
			 F   I   O   M   I   E   B   T   T   N   E   P

In the spirit of Beale efforts of bygone eras, we should award a prize
for the best anagram of the above.  JAW?  The vowel/consonant ratio is
bang on for English (should be 40% vowels), but that's not too much higher
than the initial letters of the DOI in general (eyeballing the table, so
no number at hand).

I don't know what it means -- it doesn't seem to correlate with either the
preface (do we include the title page?), the intro, or the section on the
Beale stuff (include the title there?).  If you number the words in the
Intro (ignoring the figures) it's interesting to note that 122, 151 and
164 all begin lines, but don't give any useful plaintext.  However, this
suggests that the considerable regularity in the differences might be
consistent with choosing the same word of the line, which might simplify
the search.

Good luck...
-- 
	Jim Gillogly
	{hplabs, ihnp4}!sdcrdcf!randvax!jim
	jim@rand-unix.arpa    [HASA: U (Spam) division]