The Adventure of the Dancing Men
by Arthur Conan Doyle · first published 1996
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"The Adventure of the Dancing Men", a Sherlock Holmes story written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, is one of 13 stories in the cycle published as The Return of Sherlock Holmes in 1905.
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This is a must read story. The exact same code was copied by Arthur Conan Doyle in his Sherlock Holmes story "The Adventure of the Dancing men". He just substituted the symbols in the code with different ones. Arthur Conan Doyle himself acknowledged Edgar Allan Poe's influence in his creation of Sherlock Holmes. So fans of detective fiction…
on “Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Gold-Bug” (1843)” ↗I would almost considered quoting the great ancient literature a cheat-code but I still do really like the Ecclesiastes. From the other end of the spectrum, "The Adventure of the Dancing Men" is the book/story that inspired my interest in cryptography. In the end I never worked in infromation-security but I did enjoy it from my 10 years til I left college, and I still do enjoy going for puzzle-hunts…
on “Ask HN: What are your favorite books or essays written at least 100 years ago?” ↗…propose to invest your money in this manner.” “How absurdly simple!” I cried. “Quite so!” said he, a little nettled. “Every problem becomes very childish when once it is explained to you. […]” — The Adventure of the Dancing Men, The Strand Magazine, Vol. 27, January 1904, The Return of Sherlock Holmes, by Arthur Conan Doyle <https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/108/pg108-images.html#c...>
on “Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2002) [pdf]” ↗…one of my favourite Edgar Allan Poe stories. The cipher is just a simple monoalphabetic substitution one based on frequency analysis. The same idea was "reused" by Arthur Conan Doyle in his story "The Adventure of the Dancing Men" where he used pictures of dancing men for his cipher text. Note that Conan Doyle indirectly acknowledged Poe's influence (via his character Auguste Dupin) on Sherlock Holmes in "A Study in Scarlet".…
on “The Gold-Bug: Edgar Allan Poe's story that taught me about cryptography (2024)” ↗…Of course with truly advanced technology like microchips/etc. it may be extremely difficult but with the resources of an entire state behind you may not be impossible. As Sherlock Holmes says in "The Adventure of the Dancing Men"; “What one man can invent, another can discover.”
on “The Untold Story of How US Spies Sabotaged Soviet Technology” ↗Nice, embodies the quote; "What one man can invent, another can discover" -- Sherlock Holmes in The Adventure of the Dancing Men.
on “Mechanical Pencin: A website about the hidden engineering in everyday objects” ↗As a child, I discovered cryptography in a few novels by Jules Verne. I happened to read later "The Adventure of the Dancing Men" and "The Gold-Bug", when I was already familiar with these techniques.
on “The Gold-Bug: Edgar Allan Poe's story that taught me about cryptography (2024)” ↗