Experimental Analysis of the Dorabella Cipher with Statistical Language Models

Authors

  • Bradley Hauer
  • Colin Choi
  • Anirudh S. Sundar
  • Abram Hindle
  • Scott Smallwood
  • Grzegorz Kondrak

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.3384/ecp183159

Keywords:

decipherment, language models, statistics, Dorabella, music

Abstract

The Dorabella cipher is a symbolic message written in 1897 by English composer Edward Elgar. We analyze the cipher using modern computational and statistical techniques. We consider several open questions: Is the underlying message natural language text or music? If it is language, what is the most likely language? Is Dorabella a simple substitution cipher? If so, why has nobody managed to produce a plausible decipherment? Are some unusual-looking patterns in the cipher likely to occur by chance? Can stateof-the-art algorithmic solvers decipher at least some words of the message? This work is intended as a contribution towards finding answers to these questions.

Downloads

Published

2021-08-09