Experimental Analysis of the Dorabella Cipher with Statistical Language Models
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3384/ecp183159Keywords:
decipherment, language models, statistics, Dorabella, musicAbstract
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
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2021-08-09
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Copyright (c) 2021 Bradley Hauer, Colin Choi, Anirudh S. Sundar, Abram Hindle, Scott Smallwood, Grzegorz Kondrak
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.