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Show HN: Structural analysis of the D'Agapeyeff cipher (1939)

evaneykelen Saturday, March 14, 2026

I am working on the D'Agapeyeff cipher, an unsolved cryptogram from 1939. Two findings that I haven't seen published before:

1. All 5 anomalous symbol values in the cipher cluster in the last column of a 14x14 grid. This turns out to be driven by a factor-of-2-and-7 positional pattern in the linear text.

2. Simulated annealing with Esperanto quadgrams (23M char Leipzig corpus) on a 2x98 columnar transposition consistently outscores English by 200+ points and recovers the same Esperanto vocabulary across independent runs.

The cipher is not solved. But the combination of structural geometry and computational linguistics narrows the search space significantly.

Work in progress, more to come!

Summary
The article explores the Dagapeyeff cipher, a complex encryption scheme that combines multiple layers of security. It examines the cipher's history, structure, and the challenges in decrypting it, highlighting its unique and intricate design.
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