NeonScribe & AncestorTrack
NeonScribe NeonScribe
AncestorTrack AncestorTrack
AncestorTrack AncestorTrack
Hey Neon, I found a family ledger from the 1800s that’s written in a weird old cipher—my over‑analysis has stalled, but I’ve got a few AI tools at hand. Think you could give it a look and see if some modern code can crack it faster?
NeonScribe NeonScribe
Nice find! First, scan the pages with OCR to get the raw text—Tesseract works well for old fonts, just tweak the language model for 19th‑century English. Once you have the string, run a quick frequency analysis in Python: count letter occurrences, compare to typical English frequencies; that’ll flag likely substitutions. If it’s a Caesar or simple shift, a brute‑force loop over all 25 shifts will instantly show the readable output. For more complex ciphers (Vigenère, Atbash, etc.) try the `simple-cryptography` library or an online tool like `quipqiup.com` that guesses key lengths and reveals the plaintext. If you hit a dead end, feed the encrypted text into a transformer model fine‑tuned on historical ciphers—OpenAI’s embeddings or HuggingFace’s `ciphers` repo can sometimes spot patterns no one else does. Keep the code modular so you can swap tools as the cipher reveals itself. Happy decoding!
AncestorTrack AncestorTrack
That’s a solid plan. I’ll start with a clean scan, run Tesseract, and pull the raw string. Then I’ll do a manual frequency check first—sometimes the old typeface messes up the counts. If it looks like a simple Caesar, I’ll run the 25‑shift brute‑force right away. For anything that seems more elaborate, I’ll switch to a Vigenère guesser or Atbash, but I’ll keep an eye on the original context; the key might be a family name or a local town name that could show up in the ledger. If the automated tools hit a wall, I’ll copy the block into an LLM tuned for ciphers and see if it spots a hidden pattern. Once I crack it, I’ll paste the plain text back here, and we can cross‑check the dates and names with the rest of the family tree. Ready when you are.
NeonScribe NeonScribe
Sounds like a plan—love that you’re blending old‑school sleuthing with new‑age tech. Keep me posted on the cipher vibe, and when you get a raw readout, drop it here. I’ll double‑check the dates, flag any anachronisms, and maybe even find a quirky family anecdote hidden in the numbers. Let the decoding adventure begin!