Solving the 1950 cipher meant to test life after death | Hacker News Reader

Solving the 1950 cipher meant to test life after death

creilly11235.github.io

18 pointscreilly1123515 comments

Author here, this was the last of four cryptograms from #35 of Klaus Schmeh’s list of 50 unsolved cryptograms. The first 3 were cracked in 1948, 1996 and 2019 with the last one remaining uncracked for 76 years. Wood initially set up the cipher to try to prove he could pass the key through a medium after his death.

The key ended up being the Lord's Prayer from a 1912 German Bible. The message reads Hier bin ich. Totsiens. T.E.W. "Here I am" in German, "goodbye" in Afrikaans, with Wood's initials.

Since the release of Fable I’ve been using Claude and OpenAI to try to tackle these open problems, Opus 5.5 wrote the search code and identified the books to use for the key phrase and Astra verified the results. All the code and results related to the search are up on GitHub - https://github.com/creilly11235/wood-cryptogram-1950

Klaus has confirmed the results here - https://klausschmeh.net/woods-cryptogram-from-the-crypt-anot...

Nice website, thank you for sharing this interesting history! Can I please suggest: don't let Claude do the writing for you

Totally fair, I did heavily edit and spent a lot of time refining the step through to try to make the process interesting and understandable but I should have done the writing myself.

I came across this line yesterday, I copied the text but not a link to the source unfortunately. It was in reference to PRs but it seems like a good standard to hold ourselves to.

“Don't let the AI write prose or any text another human (or the reviewer) will read. Here, the whole intention is that the text comes from a human and reflects the humans thoughts exactly. Also, as long as AI written prose is detectable, you show care for the reader by writing it well yourself. Try to have empathy for the reader as you write!”

Thanks for taking the time to take a look!

Thank you for being open to the feedback! Very cool work and well illustrated for wide audiences.

That was interesting, thanks. But the Afrikaans bit was weird. It seems that "tot sein" is also in German, and means "being dead". That makes sense.

So he proved there is life after death. He sent the key 76 years later, just had to help invent chatbots first

a beautiful (static?) website for showcasing a beautiful cipher

excellent work on both fronts (solving, and showcasing)

while he failed to demonstrate that the spirits of men continue to exercise control over this realm (after all, is it not Satan who presently rules this world?), he left something beautiful and interesting that genuinely took a while to solve considering how close it was to the computing revolution

> after all, is it not Satan who presently rules this world?

Bold claim that anyone is in charge at all, frankly.

The claim is not about a person.

What is Satan is simply the emergent system comprised of all of mankinds current desires and actions driven by them?

Yeah, I'm overthinking things but it is fun to wonder.

> the emergent system comprised of all of mankinds current desires and actions driven by them?

Not to be too snarky but this does sound a lot like ChatGPT.

a literal interpretation of what I said would be a person, but you could also interpret it more broadly as all demon-kind

both work, and it doesn't really change what I was saying, though my authorial intent was in fact to refer to the person

not that bold, but I suspect a discussion on the topic would either be unfruitful - or if it was a good conversation, would be shutdown by the site operators

So either there is no life after death or there are ghosts in Claude

So we now have evidence that AI absorbs the souls of dead people.

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