Skip to main content

Unsolved! - Craig Bauer ****

This chunky book proved to be an unexpected pleasure. Craig Bauer introduces the reader to a host of mostly unsolved ciphers, from historical greats to the latest computer-derived puzzles. Although he tells the complete story of each cipher he deals with before moving onto the next, the chapters are cleverly structured so he is able to introduce us to increasingly sophisticated mechanisms for hiding messages - and techniques for attempting to break them.

 We start with the Voynich manuscript, a whole book, probably from the fifteenth or sixteenth century in cipher form - though as Bauer points out, some believe it's a meaningless hoax. After a dabble with ancient ciphers, we next discover that Elgar was a cipher fan. I'd heard about his playful concealment in the Enigma Variations, but wasn't aware of the Dorabella cipher, which remains unsolved to this day. (Bauer also takes us through Elgar's own workings to solve a public cipher challenge, which is fascinating.) Then we zoom forward to the infamous Zodiac killings and their associated ciphers (the inspiration of the Dirty Harry movie), plus a number of other true crime stories with an unsolved cipher involved.

 I was a bit wary about this section, as I'm no fan of true crime, but the cipher element made the whole thing much more of an intriguing mystery, where the details of the crimes were necessary for cipher's context. We then go on to a whole host of other ciphers, from attempts to use them to prove communication from beyond the grave to a whole world of 'challenge ciphers' I wasn't aware of. Here, the public is challenged to deal with a cipher, some via convoluted communications such as the enigmatic Cicada 3301 challenges which spanned websites and physical locations. And, of course, there is the CIA's famous Kryptos sculpture, still partially unsolved.

 The book does have some minor irritations. Bauer can't resist exclamation marks - it's not just in the title, but almost every page seems to have them. (I can't help but wonder if there's a cipher involved, there are so many.) He also does tend to give us just a bit too much detail in the background information. So, for example, when tracing the early years of the Voynich manuscript, we are told too much dull detail, transcribing letters about it that don't add much to the narrative.

 There's also an inherent difficulty in the topic, in that most of the ciphers covered are still unsolved, as the title suggests. This means that many of the stories in the book don't have an ending - or rather they all have the same ending 'We don't know yet...' which gets wearing after a while. It's fine that some of these can be seen as challenges for the reader, if so inclined - but it makes the book work a little less well. Many of the best bits of Unsolved! were where at least a partial solution was reached. The book might have worked better if Bauer had gone for more of a mix of solved and unsolved ciphers, so we could have had regular 'aha' moments during the journey. 

 Despite the many mysteries left hanging, though, this was a thoroughly engaging read. Whether you have the patience and fortitude to have a go at cracking ciphers yourself, or, like me, are happy to be impressed with the ingenuity but would never put the time and effort in, there are some cracking (sorry) stories and surprises here. What else can I say, but TIEL TKIA CEOB HSXL B!SN ENOC

 Hardback:  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you


Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Infinity Machine - Sebastian Mallaby ****

It's very quickly clear that Sebastian Mallaby is a huge Demis Hassabis fan - writing about the only child prodigy and teen genius ever who was also a nice, rounded personality. After a few chapters, though, things settle down (I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' description of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ) and we get a good, solid trip through the journey that gave us DeepMind, their AlphaGo and AlphaFold programs, the sudden explosion of competition on the AI front and thoughts on artificial general intelligence. Although Mallaby does occasionally still go into fan mode - reading this you would think that AlphaFold had successfully perfectly predicted the structure of every protein, where it is usually not sufficiently accurate for its results to have direct practical application - we get a real feel for the way this relatively unusual company was swiftly and successfully developed away from Silicon Valley. It's readable and gives an important understanding of...
Post a Comment
Read more

In Seach of Sea Dragons - Matthew Myerscough ****

It's common advice to would-be authors of narrative non-fiction to open with something dramatic - Matthew Myerscough certainly does this with the story of his being trapped under an avalanche on Snowdon (while his girlfriend, also carried away remains on top of the snow unhurt). It certainly is dramatic, but seemed entirely disconnected from the reason I got the book, which was to read about fossil collecting.  Luckily, though, in the second chapter we get into a more conventional 'how I got interested in fossils as a boy'. Having recently reviewed Patrick Moore's autobiography and noting that astronomy was one of the few sciences where amateurs can still make a contribution, it came to mind that palaeontology is another - Myerscough is a civil engineer by trade, but just as amateur astronomers can find new details in the skies, so amateur fossil hunters have been searching for these relics for centuries. When I give talks in junior schools, the two topics that guarant...
Post a Comment
Read more

Robot-Proof - Vivienne Ming ****

As Vivienne Ming makes apparent, there seem largely to be two views of AI's pros and cons, both of which are almost certainly wrong. It's either doom-saying 'It'll destroy life as we know it' or Pollyanna-ish 'It'll do all the boring work and we can all be wonderfully creative and live lives of leisure.' Instead, Ming gives us a clear analysis of the likely trajectory for the workplace, particularly for the IT industry. She describes three 'equally flawed, intellectually lazy strategies' to deal with the impact of AI. The first is substitution and deprofessionalisation, using AI to allow cheaper 'AI-augmented technicians' to replace more expensive professionals, producing more low wage jobs and fewer mid-range. This does save money but leaves a company at risk of being easily outcompeted. The second is what Ming describes as the '"A-Player" Hunger Games', the approach favoured by Silicon Valley. This sees the growing rif...
Post a Comment
Read more