We're back. This is Midnight in the Desert, we have one hour left together. Remember to stay tuned because as soon as the show is over after the commercial break, the after show begins, Keith and Michelle will be hosting the after show. I will hang in for the first 35 to 45 minutes and we'll take your calls, your questions, have a nice discussion about this week's guests. So I hope that you'll let tune in and check that out. The after show right after tonight's live program, our guest for the final hour, Richard Bean, Dr. Richard Bean is a mathematician from Brisbane, Australia and he has worked in academia in Australia and Iran for government Queensland Health and industry, ROAM Consulting and the Australian Energy Market Operator. He has more than 30 publications and areas including combinatorics, statistics, power systems and transport and outside of his academic work, although with some overlap, Richard enjoys cycling, cycling advocacy and classical cryptography challenges.

He is here with us because I saw an article that I found fascinating how I cracked a code from the other side. This is remarkable. Dr Bean, thank you so much for being here with us this evening. 

Hi, Dave. Thanks for inviting me. 

I know you said it's about four o'clock in the afternoon in Australia. 

That's right. 

Thank you for hanging in with us today before your weekend. Well, I guess you're already deep into your weekend. It's Saturday. I keep forgetting we're time traveling here in our conversation. Talk to me about this code and if you don't mind, introduce us to the Cambridge professor and scientist that created it.

Okay. So, I think I should start with some context. This code was written in 1948 by a Cambridge professor, Robert Thouless. But it wasn't just a challenge cipher that he published in a journal so that anybody could solve it and prove that they mastered cryptanalytic techniques. This was meant to be a test of survival. So what he had done was he had taken a plain text and an English text and he had encrypted it with a key that was derived from a book. And he had then published this cipher and he said I'm not going to tell anybody what the keywords or the key book is before I die. But after I die, I'm going to try to use mediums and try to convey the knowledge of these keywords to the living.
So the context of this was he was the president of the Society for Psychical Research in the UK, and they're always interested in investigating paranormal phenomena. So he in fact was the inventor of the word Psi to describe paranormal phenomena. And you can see that the Greek letter Psi on the logo of the Society for Psychical Research even today. So in the paper, which he called A Test For Survival, he considered ways that people could prove that they’d survived death. So one of the obvious ways was that they could seal an object in a package like a picture or some words or something like that. And then the mediums could try to read his mind after he died, and see what he was trying to convey to them.
But the problem with these tests was that the package could only be opened once, but the advantage of this test that the cipher test - he came up with three of them actually - was that if you got the right keywords, then the message would make sense. You'd get plain English text out, but if you didn't know the keywords, then you'd have no chance. So he didn't foresee the power of computers. He didn't foresee that anybody would go and try to type in or scan in all the English texts out there or that computers would become as powerful as they have today, or that people could just download all the public domain books out there over the Internet.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
So, right. I mean obviously technology has jumped leaps and bounds, but he was looking for the magic to practice code. And you're saying science was more than capable of doing that.
Speaker 3 (05:04):
The really interesting part of this is the experimental design. So in fact, he published three ciphers, so it was in July 1948 he published his first cipher and he took some words from Shakespeare and, within a few months, somebody had cracked it, because he really hadn't enlisted the help of professionals, cryptography professionals. So, about six months later, he published another cipher to replace that one and he said this is how I'm going to do it. So the first one, he used the so-called Playfair cipher, which just uses a five by five square with the letters A to Z in it and, say I and J combined in one square, but, somebody managed to guess that the code word was Surprise. So even before he died, it was cracked.
So then he replaced that cipher by another one using Playfair twice. So Double Playfair. And that was strong enough to resist decryption until after his death. So he died in 1984. And the American Survival Research Foundation offered a prize of $1,000 for three years after his death, anybody who can crack this code would get the prize. And then a California computer scientist, James Gillogly, found out the key words were Black Beauty using a computer search. So he tried the book Black Beauty and all the text for the book cipher that Thouless had provided. But that wasn't the source book. And he also tried all of Shakespeare's works and the King James Bible and everything that he could get his hands on from Project Gutenberg, the online book collection.
But at that time, the book that was the source for Thouless’s book cipher hadn't been scanned in or typed in. So he was out of luck. We could say that his Toshiba laptop wasn't able to receive the emanations from Thouless or it wasn't able to solve it. So it's sort of a limitations of all things. Maybe his computer wasn't fast enough, maybe it didn't have enough storage space and maybe the network capabilities weren't good enough then. But, since then, 1995, the Internet's available all over the world and people are just typing in these books that are public domain. Google obviously has a project to scan in everything and the Internet Archive has a project to scan in everything. One day, these three things, computer speed storage and networking capabilities were going to get powerful enough that this book cipher was going to be cracked. Which raises the question of how do you design an experiment now that, if you want to encrypt something with a key, how do you devise an encryption algorithm that's strong enough to resist computer power in the future? Because obviously in 1948 the computer power of 2019 would have looked like science fiction. 

Exactly.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
Well, geez, even the, the computer power of 1995 to 2015, who would've thought that our phones would be more powerful than most computers that helped launch rockets into space back in the 60s. It's just unbelievable in that kind of leaps and bounds we've made in the technology market. So cracking codes, looking at things like this. Has the code officially been cracked and the information available for the general public, or is it something that it was cracked but the findings have been held back?
Speaker 3 (09:56):
So for the Thouless ciphers he had a passage one, which I said was a Playfair that was solved within a few months of publication. And then he had his passage two, which was a book cipher, and then he had his passage three that was replacing the passage one, which Jim Gillogly solved in 1995. So I would think that Jim tried all the books he had available in 1995, but that the key book wasn't available then. But I would think that if anybody had solved the book cipher they would've made it public, because this is one of the most famous unsolved codes that's out there. There are a few people who've written books about unsolved codes, there's a German blogger, Klaus Schmeh, and there's an American academic Craig Bauer, and they both included this code in their books. So Klaus Schmeh has actually devised a test using a somewhat stronger algorithm. He's encrypted a passage and he'll try to transmit the key to the living after he dies. But really it's anybody's guess how long that will last.
Speaker 2 (11:38):
Are there quite a few of these codes that are out there still that, that are baffling science or have most of them been hacked and cracked by now? 
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (11:58):
The context of this Thouless cipher is that I was actually reading a book co-authored by Jim Gillogly. It was called Decoding the IRA. So the Irish Republican Army. So what had happened was in the 1920s from 1926 to 1936 there was a chief of staff of the IRA called Moss Twomey. And he was communicating with people worldwide with telegrams and written coded messages, people in the US, people in the UK, Scotland. And so he had thousands of pages of encrypted messages and obviously these should have all been destroyed, but somehow they were passed along to his son. And ended up in the University College of Dublin where an Irish history researcher Tom Mahon got hold of them and he was very, he was writing a book on, on Irish history and he got in touch with the NSA, the National Security Agency in the US and said, can you help me?
Speaker 3 (13:24):
And the NSA said, no, we can't. But maybe you should talk to the American Cryptogram Association. So, they have lots of members who really enjoy doing these puzzles solving cryptograms where they know what the method is and in more advanced puzzles they solve cryptograms where they don't know what the method is. So Tom Mahon got in touch with Jim Gillogly and Jim managed to solve about a thousand of these, these ciphers, and they were enciphered with something that you would think was a fairly basic algorithm called incomplete columnar transposition, but one of them was left unsolved in the book. So Jim was unable to solve it. And he said …
Speaker 3 (14:34):
… if you managed to crack this one, let us know. So that's also one of Klaus Schmeh’s top unsolved ciphers. So I thought I'll develop some frequency tables of letters from the English language and I'll write a program on my laptop to do this or learn how this is done. And it sort of involves the areas of maths you were talking about before, the combinatorics and the statistics. Yeah. So I started writing my program to decrypt this 51 or 52 letter cryptogram but it wasn't going very well.
Speaker 3 (15:32):
The output was just gibberish, it was clearly meant to be a transposition cipher because the frequency of the letters in the input was, was very much like English with the most common letters being E and T and things like that. And I also looked at Klaus Schmeh’s blog about it and other people that had tried and they hadn't succeeded. So there was another expert there, George Lasry, who's recently done his PhD on classical ciphers, so he wasn't able to do it. People said maybe it's written in Irish Gaelic. That's why nobody can do it. But after a while, I downloaded all of these Project Gutenberg books. So there's an online site called Project Gutenberg where people upload all the public domain books.
Speaker 3 (16:36):
They scan them in and type them in and are up to about 60,000 books total. So it all started in, in 1971 in America, and it's just, it's grown. So I downloaded all these books that's about 42 gigabytes of zip files, and I used it to create frequency tables of the English letters. So you're interested in frequency tables of something called n-grams. So we know that in the English language, the most frequent letters are like E T A I O N in that order. ETAOIN SHRDLU is a good mnemonic for remembering it. But when you're doing cryptanalysis, you want frequency tables of say, double letters. So TH might be the most frequent two letter combination in English text. And so here I was developing a frequency table for six letter combinations of English texts.
Speaker 3 (17:48):
So there's about 300 million different six letter combinations of English text. So I was going through all of Project Gutenberg and getting this. And after I'd done this, so I ran my program again on this, this unsolved cipher. And the frequency table is helping you to score the output. So they're helping you see what is most likely to be English? In the output there, I saw that the output often had the six letter sequence LIGNIT, L I G N I T in it. So my program had helped me see that. And from reading the book and my own knowledge I knew that the IRA was always the first to adopt any new technology that they thought could help them. So in this case, gelignite had been invented a few decades before. And the message was about how a unit in Scotland of the IRA had raided someone and presumably obtained some gelignite, yeah. So the context of that story is quite fascinating, but it goes back a bit further than that.
Speaker 2 (19:23):
Just by having all of those books available to you all of, I mean, being able to crack the codes and just having that information accessible. Can't we find codes if we look hard enough? Things that aren't even specifically coded. I know there's a lot of talk of the Bible code. Yes. There's a lot of talk of things. I was a number of years ago on my show Darkness Radio, we were chatting with a guy who claimed to do this and I said, great, but couldn't you find any match if I said, like right now if I said in the book of Matthew, it knew I was about to ask you for about a chocolate milkshake and Elvis and he typed in the algorithm and sure enough chocolate milkshake and Elvis came up as though magically it was there. Well, it's just the, the odds of those letters and words falling in the right place in a book, that big would be pretty easy. Can we sometimes find things and maybe piece together parcels that don't necessarily belong together just because statistically it would, you would think there would be something in there that might appear to correlate with all of this?
Speaker 3 (20:40):
Yes, yes. Well, this is another fascinating area. The Bible codes I think again, it uses these areas of mathematics, the combinatorics, that's the study of permutations and combinations of numbers and the statistics. So although superficially it might look as though you've found something wonderful like after the fact you've looked in the Bible and you, you've found it predicts 9/11 and things like that. You really have to delve down into the statistics and not have any preconceptions either way. So one of the guys I knew from combinatorics conferences and university visits when I was in the area of combinatorics was a professor from the Australian National University. His name was Brendan McKay, and he'd been interested in this area of sort of hidden texts in religious texts like the Bible or the Quran or things like that since the early 1970s.
Speaker 3 (22:00):
So he actually collected books of this nature and he studied the statistics of it and wrote his own programs. And then in the early 1990s, so 20 years later these Israeli academics managed to have a paper published in one of the statistical journals saying, we've found these famous rabbis’ names and dates of birth all encoded into the first five books of the Bible, the Torah. And funnily enough the people who were backing, were backing the mathematicians up all seemed to have a Jewish background themselves. So Brendan McKay got together with some Israeli academics and he co-authored a paper explaining what was happening. So it wasn't that he was accusing them of fraud or, or anything like that. It was just saying there isn't actually anything special happening here. So it's really important not to come into this kind of study with preconceptions of any kind…

Isn't that basically what was covered in the movie? A Beautiful Mind with Russell Crowe, right? 

Oh, John Nash …

… seeing, seeing the code and everything and, and if you've looked deep enough and go into it with a preconceived notion, there's things that you can unravel that aren't, that appear real but are not.
Speaker 3 (23:48):
Yeah. It's been a while since I saw that movie. Was that sort of around the movie portrayal of his descent into schizophrenia was it?
Speaker 2 (23:58):
Yes. Yeah, yeah. Right. Where he was seeing it in magazine articles and commercials and, and everything. And yeah, I mean, that may have just been a Hollywood over representation of it, but it seemed to me that hearing so many of the things we've heard about from the quatrains of Nostradamus to the Bible Codes, there always seems to be these mysteries people are trying to de evolve. From them and I wonder how much of it is legitimate science and how much of it is just psychobabble?
Speaker 3 (24:31):
I think there was a Harvard professor. His name was Shlomo Sternberg who denounced these, these Bible code academics in the strongest possible terms. He said …
Speaker 2 (24:51):
We've got to take a quick break. Doctor, I'm sorry. We're right up against the break. Dr. Richard Bean. We'll come back. We'll continue to talk about this and more right here on midnight in the desert. We are back. This is midnight in the desert. I'm your host, Dave Schrader, Dr. Richard Bean, our guest for the remainder of tonight's show. Then right afterwards, stay tuned. The after show begins. We'll be talking about this past week's programs. They've got a lot of topics they want to cover. I'll stay for about the first half an hour to 45 minutes. If you have any questions, phone minds will be open. (520) 600-6483. That's five, two zero six zero zero six, four eight three the number to contact us and be a part of the after shell. 

All right, Dr. Bean, getting back into our conversation for the evening cracking codes going through this, have there been any, in your opinion, successful messages that have been sent from the other side? Is there any of that that you've ever uncovered or found?
Speaker 3 (25:54):
Using cryptography as a medium? No, I'm not aware of any. There is just one more classical cryptography cipher that's being done in this way. It's by a guy called T. E. Wood and it was only 21 letters and apparently combined several different languages and the book wasn't in it in English, so that's still unsolved. But I think it'd be very difficult to solve. It's still out there if anybody wants to try to receive the key. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:32):
Is there in the messages that are left, I mean, how many of them are messages from beyond as opposed to just messages that they might be relevant sometime in the future?
Speaker 3 (26:47):
Ah I was answering your question in the context of A Test of Survival. So it was Professor Thouless who introduced these kinds of tests to see if he could transmit a key from the afterlife. And several people after him wrote texts and there's one of these examples by Wood that hasn't been solved. But I'm not aware of any successful examples where a cipher was solved, but not by computer.
Speaker 2 (27:28):
There has been so much research from in PSI and in these organizations, the Society for Psychical Research and, and testing, looking for some kind of proof of an afterlife and communication. Of course, Harry Houdini making such a well-known pact with his wife that should he cross over before her or she cross over before him, they had a key words and elements that they would look for and trying to communicate with one another. And although it's still hotly debated, the general consensus is the message never truly came through for that. Do you think mathematically speaking, if there is an alternate reality, parallel universe and afterlife theoretically, should there be a way to transmit a message and have it picked up on the side?
Speaker 3 (28:24):
Yeah. This is sort of the last paragraph of my article for the Conversation and the ABC. Can we design an experiment such that it's immune to all advances in computer power, but then you have to be able to not just receive messages from the other world. You have to be able to foresee all advances in computer power, networking and storage. So that's really difficult. Now I'd encourage anybody interested in this area to just go back and read Thouless’s 1948 and 1949 papers because he foresaw a lot of these problems when he was designing his experiments and that's why they became so famous. But one method that he proposed was using something called a one-time pad encryption. This method you might've heard of, of course, the Rosenbergs Julius and Ethel Rosenberg the nuclear spies executed by the US in the 50s …
Speaker 3 (29:53):
Yeah. They were caught because the one-time pad encryption was broken basically because the one-time pad was used more than once. So the government agencies were able to decrypt their communications and then identify them. But so Thouless actually considered using the one-time pad. But something he seems to have overlooked is you use a truly random key just a, a bunch of random letters. Well, obviously it's, it's really difficult to remember this code he came up with is 74 letters. So I think it would be…  he was talking about burdening his mind with this in the afterlife. Like was it really feasible that he, he could remember this code until he died and then after he died and then transmit it to the living.
Speaker 3 (30:56):
But there's another more practical problem that he missed, which is that if he writes out his plain text and he has a truly random key, and then there's a ciphertext and then he publishes the ciphertext and then he destroys the plaintext and he destroys the key, then there's no way anybody can reverse that process. There's nobody, there's no way anyone can work out what key he used or what plaintext he used? It's gone forever after he's dead. So that's a big flaw in his paper which no one seems to have noticed. So I wrote a letter to the editor of the Journal for the Society of Psychical Research pointing this out. I suppose it will be published soon. 

(** RB Note 12 June 2020: Thouless does say in the paper that this really has the same flaw as his original idea, so I was wrong about this!)

How did they respond to that? I haven't gotten a response yet. Just that they’re considering it..
Speaker 2 (31:51):
They're, they're reading your response right now going well, crap, that was unexpected. It's funny how some of the greatest minds sometimes we'll miss …
Speaker 3 (32:02):
The obvious, right? Yeah. Something like that.
Speaker 2 (32:07):
There is a gentleman here in the United States by the name of Mark Macey. I would love to connect you with Mark. It's been a number of years since I've talked to Mark, but he was getting what he believed to be transmissions from the other side. He was getting these
Speaker 3 (32:25):
Yeah,
Speaker 2 (32:27):
Papers that were left on his computer. There were a lot of gibberish and then there would be words spread throughout that …
Speaker 3 (32:38):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (32:38):
You could look at and make, make out
Speaker 3 (32:40):
A sentence or two throughout this big page of gibberish. But I have often wondered if there was something else coded into this mathematically or something, something that was trying to be transmitted. They were giving key words and elements to it and then something else. And he, he was intrigued by the concept, but I don't know that he ever took it any further than that. But it would be interesting to have somebody like you re-examine these quote unquote messages from beyond and see if there is something else too that, I mean, do you, is that something that even intrigues you to examine or is it just you've got enough real-world issues to deal with that you don't need to sit down … possible nutty papers. 

Yeah, I hadn't heard about this. I suppose I could take a look. I suppose what you you're talking about is the concept of steganography. So hidden messages in something that appears normal or also the concept of, I suppose, something in information entropy. So is this message really random or does it contain some structure, some patterns so that we can talk about something, is there actually communication here and you might've heard of the Voynich Manuscript, the world's most mysterious manuscript. 

Yes. Yes.
Speaker 2 (34:09):
I wanted to get to that. So I'm glad you brought it up. I mean, is that something that you've ever taken a look at or even have an interest in examining?
Speaker 3 (34:18):
Well, I've been reading a lot about the history of cryptography. I, going back from this style of cipher, we go back to the IRA cipher and I got interested in the Kryptos sculpture of the CIA a few years before that. And so this is what led into my recent academic interest in it. So reading the history of cryptography it hasn't always been mathematicians and computer scientists that have been people there have been people who were just naturally talented at it. Like there was a guy called John Tiltman who was 60 years at the sharp end of military cryptanalysis. And he managed to move from the study of manual ciphers to machine ciphers, which is pretty amazing, but he didn't have any academic training. He was just a master cryptanalyst, I guess.
Speaker 3 (35:25):
So he became interested in in the Voynich manuscript and wrote a 50 page document about it, which is his only unclassified publication. So because he was interested in it, so lots of other people, at the NSA they became interested in it. You see it mentioned in the, in the book The Codebreakers by David Kahn, which is just the tour de force of the history of classical cryptography. So lots of people they got into that. But I would think that to make progress on deciphering the Voynich Manuscript, you'd need to be  a real linguistics master as well as a lot of the mathematical theory of linguistics as well. And I'm not that person. It's like a rabbit hole that you could fall into and it goes infinitely deep.
Speaker 2 (36:32):
Yeah, I would guess so. Through all of this in all of the different codes that have been put out there, the, the different aspects of these stories. And I guess even like the Zodiac codes, right? I mean, here you have to what's the right word? Lay people and experts in code breaking. They were able to break and crack some of the ciphers. Is that because you need a fresh set of eyes that aren't already predetermined or predisposed to look at something in a specific set of parameters?
Speaker 3 (37:08):
Yeah, I don't know. The problem is, I don't know the other side of the story. So I know that there was the two amateurs who solved it and it was some kind of substitution cipher with what is it, one letter going to multiple symbols. But I don't know how much effort the NSA and the FBI were putting into that at the time, but they got in very early in the piece, it was published in the newspaper and within a day they had the answer. So it's really hard to say, they beat the FBI and the NSA in that context. Yeah. But yeah. I've heard other people say … there was a book called Can You Crack The Enigma Code? And some a team of people worked on it for I think six or seven years and they said the lessons from it were that it does help to take long breaks from it and to freshen up your mind. So if you get a bit obsessed with solving something like the Zodiac, the 340 cipher as it's called, and you start to see things that aren't really there, like the Bible Codes.
Speaker 2 (38:32):
Right? Right. You start you start looking into some of those aspects in there. Just, you're going to have so many people coming at it. I just what's boggled me is that, that some of these codes that have been cracked from outsiders, some will come with a code and somebody else will come with another version of the story. Both of the codes seem to line up. Do you think that there are some aspects of these codes that the author did that on purpose that he gave two alternate versions, depending on which way you tried to break the code down?
Speaker 3 (39:09):
Yes, yes. There have been some codes that have been done like that deliberately. There was a very famous cipher called the Hill Cipher was invented by Lester Hill in the 1920s and 1930s. He was a math professor, but it actually seemed that it was independently invented by a guy called Levine a few years before. And his version of the cipher was actually about
Speaker 3 (39:43):
writing a cipher text that when you gave one key, it could be decrypted in one way, and when you gave another key could be decrypted in another way. So it's called a duress cipher and you see it. And you see it in the second passage and in the Kryptos sculpture at the CIA. So it can be done deliberately. I'm not sure that it can be done accidentally. So the story about the second part of the Kryptos sculpture that, oops, the sculptor said I made a mistake, but that seems extremely unlikely. I think it was done by design.
Speaker 2 (40:29):
All right. We only have about 10 minutes left together.
Speaker 3 (40:34):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (40:35):
Are there still some really amazing magical, and I don't mean that in the, woo sense, but I mean, are there still some really interesting things you think that are going to be found that have been left behind for us all this time and maybe it's even been glaringly obvious right in front of our faces.
Speaker 3 (40:55):
In terms of codes? Yes.
Oh yeah. I think there are, as I said, there are a few books on unsolved ciphers. I would pass on the ones like the Zodiac 340 cipher and the Voynich manuscript, I think they've really been gone over. When I was writing the article
Speaker 3 (41:29):
about the Thouless cipher it was for a website called The Conversation. And the level of the writing, now I was helped by a journalist, was for high school students. So the whole point of this for me is if I can inspire like high school students to take up mathematics and computer science. Anyone out there listening? So what Jim Gillogly says in the Decoding the IRA book is it's essential to have a positive mental attitude. It's if you believe that you can crack this code, you might very well be right. But if you think that you can't, then you will almost certainly be right. So I like to, I think that the interesting codes out there are ones with a good context. So they have a fascinating backstory or context.
Speaker 3 (42:32):
There's, there's one out there called the Somerton Man or the Tamam Shud case where a man's body was found on a beach in South Australia in 1948 the same year as the Thouless cipher. And there was no missing persons report. Nobody knew who he was. It didn't have any identification on him. He just had a piece of paper in his pocket that said, Tamam Shud, It is finished in Persian. And after a search was conducted, for the book this came from, they found like these letters that were obviously from an indentation in the books it had come from. It was amazing that they found this book, the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. But the problem is it looks like a code that's made of the initials, so the first letters of English words.
Speaker 3 (43:36):
So there really isn't enough context to work out what the original message was because he was found dead on a beach alone. People, they like to invent a context around that. So they like to, they like to write poetry around it so you can find things like for the, there's the initials, M L I A D O they come up with My Love Is A Barren Oblivion. So they … like he's committed suicide. So it's sort of the Rorschach test of, of unsolved codes. My concept is that in the future we'll be able to use computers to write poetry around this, this kind of code so you can get some very impressive poetry. Just by computers. I found that really hard to believe it myself. But I think computer poetry generators can write something better than well, almost any human right now? I know it's scary. 
So … wanted to know, are you aware of Cicada 3301

Oh one. It's, it is in the unsolved book by Craig Bauer. But the problem is
Speaker 3 (45:01):
There's no, I mean it's, it's very mysterious that we see all these messages appearing all around the world at the same time. 

But I guess if you give us a little narrative of it. I, I've, I've not heard it before. 

Oh, okay. As far as I know I think messages were published on the internet somehow. And there was a they've directed people to a website where there was an image and if you were able to look at the code of the image you could find a hidden message there directing you to another website and then directed you to various places around the world in, in different countries where these messages were taped on telephone poles which was obviously someone who put a lot of effort into doing and nobody really knows what it was for, like whether it was just an intelligence organization recruitment drive or just someone having fun. But the context became really interesting. Just by the backstory. Yeah. 

And she also brings up the ARG. Are you familiar with this? 

No, what’s that 

Alternate reality game? … interactive network narrative that uses both. I don't know if this is a new code or what's going on with it.
Speaker 3 (46:30):
Okay. Yeah. A successor to Cicada 3301?

I'm not sure if she just sent me a link, but it doesn't seem to be about a secret code that I'm reading. Oh yeah, I'd be, yeah. I'm not sure on this either. So there's, listen, there's always somebody out trying to challenge the minds. What intrigued me in what you just said was that it might be an intelligence recruitment platform. 
Yeah. Yeah.
Is that something they do? 
Do they just throw up sites? 
Yeah. Yes. Oh yeah. Yeah. You've, we've seen all the English speaking ones and I think the Mossad as well. So GCHQ, NSA and ASIO who have all put out codes on the internet to attract people's attention or Twitter, things like that, solve this, get in touch with us. It's a way to get into the media. So it wouldn't be a surprising to me at all if Cicada 3301 was an attempt to get really motivated talented people to solve these codes and join them. Even guns for hire. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (47:40):
What, what a weird, weird world we live in.
Speaker 3 (47:45):
You've got the iPhone exploits, they're selling for one or $2 million. I think you can have freelance intelligence consultants. You get them, by doing that, yeah.
Speaker 2 (47:59):
I guess very cool. We are at the end of the show. That could be in, thank you for coming on and sharing some of your insights and stories with us. It's been interesting and everybody loves a good mystery and a good puzzle. It's amazing to know that there are people out there working this and, why maybe you could tell us that with about a minute left. Why is it so important? And what makes unsolved code so worth spending time on at this point.
Speaker 3 (48:28):
Yeah. Well they were in classical cryptography. It's really about inspiring of the next generation to take up science, technology, engineering and mathematics. There's no point in you just typing a code into a program and having you solve it, you need to think through critically about how it's done, how it was invented and then try to break it. So it's the context of unsolved codes that makes them interesting. But really it's about inspiring the next generation to use computer power in new ways.
Speaker 2 (49:05):
Well have a great rest of your day and thank you so much for being here with us. Dr Bean. We will, I'm sure cross paths again in the future as more strange things are released out there.
Will you come back to us if you crack more codes or find something else interesting to bring to our attention? 
Sure, sure. 
Thank you so much and thank you all for tuning in and spending some time with us here tonight. (49:28)