Codice Olindo, cipher thoughts...

Yesterday, I posted up a low-resolution image of some Codice Olindo ciphertext: it appears to be a set of slightly-accessorized 8-directional arrows (and a few double-headed arrows, plus some additional shapes (punctuation?)). It struck me when I woke up this morning that - statistics aside - this might simply be a kind of arrow-based pigpen cipher, where the arrows point to the appropriate corner of the 3x3, and the accessorization indicates which 3x3 block to refer to.

Typically, modern-day code-breakers focus (if not over-focus) on the transcription and computer analyses. However, people are sometimes motivated by quite different things from pure security - the psychology is at least as important. Pigpen is easy because you can decrypt it very fast (an arrow-based pigpen would be at least as quick to read as a 'proper' one), and perhaps this is what Olindo Romano wanted. And it seems likely to me that he thought/thinks he's cleverer than all the people around him (whether that's true or not).

Of course, this is the kind of approach I have used when looking at the Voynich Manuscript, so it should come as no surprise that this is how I look at things. I wonder: if the Italian "mathematicians" who have deciphered this cipher plotted out the letters they have found on 3x3 arrow-pigpen grids, what would they find?

"Codice Olindo", update...

First sight (for me at least) of the Codice Olindo's cryptography: admittedly the quality is abysmal, but it's better than no picture at all. I found it on the Corriere di Como's website. Pieces of ciphertext are interspersed with cleartext: the third (clear) line appears to read "Rosa non posso e..." (Rosa is the wife of Olindo Romano, the main accused in the case).

For more background on the trial, here's an article from The Scotsman (30th January 2008), and a Agenzia Giornalistica Italia page from yesterday (11th February 2008).

Massacring your noisy neighbours seems a little bit extreme to me: I think I'd prefer to send them unsettling notes, as in this wonderful true story from New York (called The Astoria Notes, from David Friedman's Ironic Sans blog), with its surreal follow-up. Enjoy!

The "Codice Olindo"...

Here's a cryptography story from Italy that is astounding (though perhaps not for good reasons). I found it thanks to an Italian blogger who called it the new Voynich ('il nuovo Voynich'), but that's perhaps a little bit strong.

While on trial accused of a "massacre" ('strage Erba'), the accused writes down a long series of enciphered notes in a bible... the cipher then gets broken (by Andrea Rizzi, Gregorio Guidi, and Roberto Frigerio), revealing the defendant's thoughts on many (probably too many) aspects of the case. The trial continues: there is extensive coverage on the Wildgreta blog (in Italian). I've tried to find online pictures of the cipher (without success): but as it has already been definitively cracked (it would seem), there's no huge sense of urgency.

Cryptographically, the tragedy is that it sounds (by all accounts) like a monoalphabetic cipher with a few nulls that even Cicco Simonetta's Regule could have cracked 550 years ago (I'm sure Augusto Buonafalce and Marcello Simonetta would agree); while the Voynich Manuscript (from the same era) still can't be decrypted today. Madness. :-(