[HN Gopher] Vergil's secret message
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Vergil's secret message
Author : diodorus
Score : 43 points
Date : 2023-09-30 19:16 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (aeon.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (aeon.co)
| red_admiral wrote:
| There was (and still is) a whole subfield of scholars trying to
| find hidden messages in Shakespeare's works. Most of them are
| cranks. At some point though, Claude Shannon, the father of
| Information Theory, looked at these claims and suggested an
| empirical test: does the claimed hidden message contain text well
| beyond the point of uniqueness (I think it was originally called
| the unicity point)?
|
| For example, suppose you stumble across the symbols
| NEZNIVEHZDHRPNABGEBVNRDHVCEVZHFNOBEVF. Someone tells you that it
| in fact contains a secret message in ROT13, namely the opening
| line of Vergil's Aeneid. Should you believe them or are they
| overfitting?
|
| In this case, it turns out that no system of roughly the same
| complexity as ROT13 (and that includes any of the 26! examples of
| 1:1 mappings of the letters) produces anything close to this good
| a match, so the explanation "this is ROT13" accounts for much
| more than you would expect by chance. For the same reason, in the
| linked article the acrostic NIKANDROS in a poem by someone of
| that name (at least when rendered in Greek) looks too good to be
| a coincidence.
|
| On the other hand, suppose you encounter the word SXLL and
| someone tells you that it's the encoding of the word BLUE with a
| Vigenere square (basically A=0, B=1 etc. modulo 26) and the key
| RMRH. The math works out, but there are as many degrees of
| freedom in the key as there are in the supposed codeword (this is
| a one-time pad, for cryptographers) so you could equally well say
| that SXLL is an encoding of STOP with the key AEXW. This claim
| does not pass the point of uniqueness (which for the true one-
| time pad diverges to infinity of course, that's the point!).
|
| By this technique, most claims of secret messages in Shakespeare
| fall because there's other, equally complex systems that turn up
| equally plausible different messages.
|
| In a work the size of Vergil's (or Shakespeare's), you are bound
| to find some supposed acrostics by chance alone, especially if
| you allow yourself some degrees of freedom (like skipping the
| occasional line). My question for the claimed Isaiah one is
| whether this one is really past the point of uniqueness,
| something so unlikely under the null hypothesis of coincidence
| that we can be sure it's an actual "easter egg" hidden here. Of
| course, the fact that ISAIAH SAYS is on-topic for the plot here
| is Bayesian evidence in favour of it being real.
| drittich wrote:
| That's really interesting. To me, an idea like that alone would
| have been enough to make Claude Shannon memorable.
| m463 wrote:
| He did cooler things than inventing information theory.
|
| He also invented the first juggling robot.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juggling_robot#Bounce_juggling
| [deleted]
| 50 wrote:
| > classical texts are enmeshed in a dense web of relationships
| that can surprise and invigorate us, even after thousands of
| years
|
| "[E]nmeshed in a web of relationships", i.e., intertextual[1].
|
| Further reading: Hermann Broch's novel, _The Death of Virgil_ ,
| and Simone Weil's lesser known compilation of writings,
| _Intimations of Christianity Among the Ancient Greeks_.
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intertextuality
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| The web of relationships extends to music as well. After
| reading that Broch novel, one might enjoy the cycle of works by
| Jean Barraque that took their inspiration from _The Death of
| Virgil_.
| rgrieselhuber wrote:
| Side question: I always thought it was spelled Virgil, has it
| been decided to spell his name differently?
| rgrieselhuber wrote:
| Huh, TIL: https://www.thoughtco.com/is-it-virgil-or-
| vergil-116735
| LegionMammal978 wrote:
| Both spellings have been used in English for a long time [0];
| "Virgil" is just the far more common of the two. Wikipedia
| claims that the original spelling "Vergilius" was changed to
| "Virgilius" some centuries after his death [1], and the latter
| became the form that spread to other languages.
|
| [0]
| https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Virgil%2CVergi...
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgil#Spelling_of_name
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Kennedy's discovery of the musical division of Plato's Republic
| is my favorite example of secret messages in literature
| yayitswei wrote:
| In the age of chatgpt it's easier than ever to practice acrostics
| in your own work.
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