Codes, Ciphers and Secret Writing

1 annotation • data

First annotation on Aug 13th, 2025.

The illustration on the following page was drawn by Bernard M. Oliver, and is reproduced from his article in the anthology, Interstellar Communication, edited by A. G. W. Cameron. It represents a picture obtained by scanning a 31–by–41 matrix of 1,271 cells (it was because of this picture that I used a matrix of that size as an example) with a series of 1,271 digits made up of zeros and ones. Oliver gives the entire series in his article. It begins: 1000000 … Scanning the rows from left to right, and taking rows from top to bottom as in ordinary reading, the seven digits indicate that in the first row a spot goes in the first cell and the next six cells are empty.