Donald Menzel, a Harvard astronomer/astrophysicist, was also inspired by The Gold-Bug. Among other things, he helped the Navy organize a secret cryptanalysis-training class at women's colleges during WW2.
See the paper "The Cryptologic Contributions of Dr. Donald Menzel" by Craig Bauer and John Ulrich.
I thought it would be interesting to see if the local AI I use for quick question and answer stuff could crack the code.
I use Deepseek V4 flash 0731 Q8 quantisation from unsolth with reasoning turned off on a local server for quick easy tasks. Note I use another model locally for harder tasks that need reasoning.
I was a bit dissappointed that it knew it was Poe's cypher so didn't need to even try to crack the code.
See the paper "The Cryptologic Contributions of Dr. Donald Menzel" by Craig Bauer and John Ulrich.
I use Deepseek V4 flash 0731 Q8 quantisation from unsolth with reasoning turned off on a local server for quick easy tasks. Note I use another model locally for harder tasks that need reasoning.
I was a bit dissappointed that it knew it was Poe's cypher so didn't need to even try to crack the code.