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Comment by double122 | Hacker News Reader

It's just a frequency count of the letters in the transcriptions I did. Obviously my transcript may not be perfect, but I was pretty confident with most of the letters.

This was just my first observation and I thought it was interesting enough to post.

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I guess, isn't it weird that nearly matches the graph for English? If each letter moved to the right 8 places closely matched the expected value of that letter that would suggest that that you would be on to something.

Doesn't this point to it might be a fraud as you wouldn't expect an encrypted message to contain the exact same distribution as expected unless they just switched letters of near the same frequency around?

That's a valid point. I appreciate that it may be nothing, but that won't discourage me from having a little play with it.

Here's a CSV containing the frequency of all words from 2 upto 10 letters http://d122.com/murdermystery/words.csv if anyone's interested.

"rcbrnse" five times?!

I don't want to discourage you, but I just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing something. I know there are a lot of people smarter than me, and I am no expert here so I thought you might know something I don't.

I wonder what his influences would have been around 1965...he would have been around 7. I also did catch that he is very detail oriented when it came to correcting his "mistakes".

Looking for a 7 letter word from this list: http://www.world-english.org/english500.htm

gives 27 hits. Could be a name as well though. I realize this might appear as unsophisticated brute force, I'm just thinking aloud really.

It could just mean that it's a transposition-only cipher.

Exactly. To clarify: a transposition cipher is one that just scrambles the letters in the plaintext according to some algorithm to get the ciphertext, which would cause you to get the same letter frequencies as the plaintext.

The problem is figuring out the rules of transposition so you can reverse them to decipher. There are tons of possibilities and you can't exactly plug a corpus this large into an anagram solver...

That said, the fact that there are also several repeated sections ("words") does make me wonder if it's a hoax, that's not something I'd expect to see with a transposition cipher, unless the transposition rules somehow preserved repetition in passages?

Anyway, food for thought.

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