The Woman Who Smashed Codes

by Jason Fagone

Codebreaking is about noticing and manipulating patterns. Humans do this without thinking. We’re wired to see patterns. Codebreakers train themselves to see more deeply.

It’s not quite true that history is written by the winners. It’s written by the best publicists on the winning team.

Science to them was about results: defeating gravity, rewriting literary history, finding the secret to eternal life. Huge, epic, shocking, revolutionary ends. William never used such words. He didn’t care about the answers so much as the questions. He enjoyed science because it was an interesting way of being alive.

This is the essence of codebreaking, finding patterns, and because it’s such a basic human function, codebreakers have always emerged from unexpected places. They pop up from strange corners. Codebreakers tend to be oddballs, outsiders. The most important trait is not pure math skill but a deeper ability to pay attention.

“a group of two operators, working harmoniously as a unit, can accomplish more than four operators working singly. Different minds, centered on the same problem, will supplement and check each other; errors will be found quickly; interchange of ideas will bring results rapidly. In short, two minds, ‘with but a single thought,’ bring to bear upon a given subject that concentration of effort and facility of treatment which is not possible for one mind alone.”

One way of thinking about science is that it’s a check against the natural human tendency to see patterns that might not be there. It’s a way of knowing when a pattern is real and when it’s a trick of your mind.

There were two main animal kingdoms of cipher, “transposition” and “substitution.” A transposition cipher was like Scrabble, a jumbling of the same letters into a new order. A substitution cipher was a swapping of letters.

In general, the shorter the cryptogram, the harder it is to solve, the same way a song is harder to identify by three notes of its melody instead of twenty.

One of the mysteries of falling in love is that it makes you inarticulate and eloquent at the same time. You lose the ability to speak and write in normal ways (How futile are words!) even as you develop, with this person you love, assuming this person loves you back, a shorthand of glances and gestures. At first it seems like your beloved is “speaking in code”; later, maybe, it’s like the two of you are sharing a secret code.

While employed at Bell Labs, he came up with the insight that the problem of communicating through a noisy system, like a phone wire, is almost identical to the process of enciphering and deciphering a message. In other words, according to Shannon, making yourself understood to another person is essentially a problem of cryptology. You reduce the noise of the channel between you (instead of noise, Shannon called it “information entropy”) in a way that can be quantified. And the method for reducing the noise—for recovering messages that would otherwise be lost or garbled—is decryption.

Viewed through Shannon’s theory, intimate communication is a cryptologic process. When you fall in love, you develop a compact encoding to share mental states more efficiently, cut noise, and bring your beloved closer. All lovers, in this light, are codebreakers.

“Remember always that the dawn of man’s conscience is only 3 or 3½ thousand years behind us.”

It was funny how he felt more and more generous toward Fabyan by the year. You get older and want to connect to the people who understand. You try to speak with the young and find that something is wrong with your ears. They use their own slang, their own code, and you start to feel nostalgic about your former enemies, who at least shared the same intense moment on earth and spoke words you could understand.

Codebreaking is work and patience and method and mind.