Talk:Bacon's cipher

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I think this article should indicate in what part of his works Bacon devised this cipher (if in fact he devised it.) Rick lightburn (talk) 03:57, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

Keeping this page and cleaning it up seems better than merging into Francis Bacon. At the very least it should be merged to a page on ciphers or codes. Notcarlos 12:03, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I agree, the cipher can stand alone from Francis Bacon and his supposed authorship of Shakepeare's plays. However, should it be moved to Bacon's cipher? RJFJR 04:58, May 18, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] binary

It seems to me it should be noted that the AAAAA, AAAAB pattern is accurately depicted as a binary numbering of the alphabet. Eg, number the letters A-Z from 0-25 where A is 1, B is 2, C is 3, etc. Then convert the number of the letter to its binary form. Then exchange the 0s in the form for As and exchange the 1s for Bs. This would allow the pattern for any letter to be calculated instead of forcing the memorization of the entire table. An even cleaner set of directions would leave out the ABAAB notation entirely and convert directly from typeface into binary.

Although I can't find supporting evidence, I'm fairly certain that this would be the method used by Bacon in the application of the cipher.Tritium6 21:14, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

I agree. In noticed the similarity immediately the first time I used the cipher.Edain Narsil 08:59, 8 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Steganography

Why is this steganography and not a true cipher? Surely this is just a simple substitution cipher, where you are replacing five letters for one. You are not really just hiding messages, you are actually creating a cipher. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.64.20.155 (talk) 16:07, 14 October 2007 (UTC)

Ciphers use keys. If you know the cipher that was used to encrypt a message but not the key, then it should still be difficult to decrypt the ciphertext. The replacement of letters by other letters without using a key (as it is done here) is called a code not a cipher. The main point of Bacon's cipher is to hide a message in anouther message. Hence classifying Bacon's cipher as steganography is correct. The title "Bacon's cipher" is therefore a misnomer, but Wikipedia generally prefers the most commonly used name to corrected but unused names. 85.2.23.43 10:01, 15 October 2007 (UTC)