Solving the 1950 cipher meant to test life after death

Re:Solving the 1950 cipher meant to test life after death by creilly11235 on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @10:49AM (#50167285)

Author here, this was the last of four cryptograms from #35 of Klaus Schmeh’s list of 50 unsolved cryptograms. The first 3 were cracked in 1948, 1996 and 2019 with the last one remaining uncracked for 76 years. Wood initially set up the cipher to try to prove he could pass the key through a medium after his death.

The key ended up being the Lord's Prayer from a 1912 German Bible. The message reads Hier bin ich. Totsiens. T.E.W. "Here I am" in German, "goodbye" in Afrikaans, with Wood's initials.

Since the release of Fable I’ve been using Claude and OpenAI to try to tackle these open problems, Opus 5.5 wrote the search code and identified the books to use for the key phrase and Astra verified the results. All the code and results related to the search are up on GitHub - https://github.com/creilly11235/wood-cryptogram-1950

Klaus has confirmed the results here - https://klausschmeh.net/woods-cryptogram-from-the-crypt-anot...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Solving the 1950 cipher meant to test life after death by dweinus on Thursday October 22, 2026 @05:45PM (#50201486)

Nice website, thank you for sharing this interesting history! Can I please suggest: don't let Claude do the writing for you

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Solving the 1950 cipher meant to test life after death by creilly11235 on Friday October 23, 2026 @12:02PM (#50211192)

Totally fair, I did heavily edit and spent a lot of time refining the step through to try to make the process interesting and understandable but I should have done the writing myself.

I came across this line yesterday, I copied the text but not a link to the source unfortunately. It was in reference to PRs but it seems like a good standard to hold ourselves to.

“Don't let the AI write prose or any text another human (or the reviewer) will read. Here, the whole intention is that the text comes from a human and reflects the humans thoughts exactly. Also, as long as AI written prose is detectable, you show care for the reader by writing it well yourself. Try to have empathy for the reader as you write!”

Thanks for taking the time to take a look!

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Solving the 1950 cipher meant to test life after death by dweinus on Saturday October 24, 2026 @06:15PM (#50225937)

Thank you for being open to the feedback! Very cool work and well illustrated for wide audiences.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Solving the 1950 cipher meant to test life after death by czaber on Friday October 23, 2026 @02:32AM (#50205170)

That was interesting, thanks. But the Afrikaans bit was weird. It seems that "tot sein" is also in German, and means "being dead". That makes sense.

[ Parent | on HN ]