Thursday, October 14, 2010

Continuing to work on the Search Challenge!

Anyone have any luck yet?

I've been taking the tack of trying to identify the kind of code, and work from there.  Unfortunately, nothing's been working yet.  I've been trying variations on the theme of:

[ code common phrases leaving out words ] 

and related searches... but nothing's popped out at me yet.

Have you had any better luck?

I'll leave this out there for another day, then try a completely different approach.

1 comment:

  1. I think I found it. It is the story Calloway's Code by O Henry http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/14992/

    Here is the path I took to get there.

    After searching for all sorts of different words associated with those mentioned I went to the Library of Congress web site and had a live chat with a research librarian. During our discussion I remembered there is the National Security Agency's National Cryptologic Museum in the area.

    Looking through their web site and virtual tour http://www.nsa.gov/about/cryptologic_heritage/museum/virtual_tour/index.shtml I saw mention of the Kahn Collection.

    Looked up Dr. David Kahn and found http://david-kahn.com/david-kahn-books-literature.htm

    I went to Google Books and tried ["David Kahn" cliche]. BINGO!
    http://www.google.com/search?tbs=bks%3A1&tbo=1&q=%22david+kahn%22+cliche&btnG=Search+Books

    First result shows this snippet
    "Calloway, a newspaper correspondent, gets a scoop past the censor's eye by using the first half of a newspaper cliche as the codeword for the second half, which forms the plaintext."

    Then I did a Google Search for [calloway cliche censors] that showed me it was a short story by O Henry titled "Calloway's Code."

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