

The 16th century computer and the book that kills - triplesec
http://www.marianotomatis.it/blog/index.php?post=20130322

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Scaevolus
This is a 1-dimensional cellular automaton. Apparently John Dee was fascinated
by the chaotic patterns such automata are famous for. It reminds me of Stephen
Wolfram's love of Rule 30.

Conway's Game of Life similarly intrigued hackers in the 20th century, but
without the mystical subtext.

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pmjordan
Oddly enough, it _does_ share the life/death subtext.

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greenyoda
I can't help thinking that these books might have been keys for encrypting
messages. Key-based substitution ciphers, such as the Vigenère cipher[1], were
already known in the 1500s. If two people each had a copy of this book, they
could send a key to each other by referring to a sequence of characters such
as "the third row on page 25". The messenger who carried this message wouldn't
be able to reconstruct the key without a copy of the book. If you wanted to
give the code to somebody else, you wouldn't have to send them the book: just
tell them the "seed" words and the algorithm for generating the pages, which
could be sent separately, for security.

[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vigen%C3%A8re_cipher>

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Scaevolus
Using this as a keypad (modular addition) would be much better than the
Vigenère cipher, since there aren't such obvious correlations between key
characters-- a good cellular automata is closer to a proper PRF.

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triplesec
I haven't delved into the whole logics, but it seems from the wikipedias
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Soyga>) that there's much more to be
decoded from the tables. Given their likely magical or esoteric nature, the
contents themselves of course are likely to be much less interesting to HN
than their encoding... but a challenge remains.

