GeekDad Puzzle Of The Week: Through The Looking Glass Solution

Promotional Image: "Alice In Wonderland"

Congratulations to Emerson Williams, who is neither Tweedle Dee nor Tweedle Dum, and managed to solve the Lewis Carroll cipher and win a $50 gift certificate from the Web version of the Cheshire Cat, ThinkGeek.

Puzzle:

Lewis Carroll, before sitting down to write Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, was a mathematician at Oxford University. Though he was good at it, he found the work boring and his mind wandered. However, he did enjoy playing with numbers and developing secret messaging systems. Eventually, his boredom led to writing and developing the amazing settings of Wonderland, Jabberwocky and others.

Tim Burton has taken Carroll’s imagination and expanded it, as seen in trailers for his vision of Alice In Wonderland, coming out this week. I’m not the first GeekDad to note that Burton’s vision is a little freakish. If Carroll were alive today, he might also find it freakish and agree with us that:

IVTP KALO JDED RILA JIVE WQFK XXIE ULSK TWHE ZXSZ BZPL IEGU PR

Solution:

Lewis Carroll was attributed with creating the Alphabet Cipher, a variation on the Vigenère cipher. Carroll’s cipher uses a tabula recta that is tied to a keyword only the sender and receiver would know. In our case, the keyword was freakish. By repeating the keyword as often as necessary to match up with the coded phrase, we are halfway to our solution:

FREA KISH FREA KISH FREA KISH FREA KISH FREA KISH FREA KISH FR
IVPT KALO JDED RILA JIVE WQFK XXIE ULSK TWHE ZXSZ BZPL IEGU PR

Then, using the tabula recta, we begin searching out answers. In the first case, finding F on the horizontal axis and then moving down the column until we find I, looking over to to the vertical axis for the correct letter: D. From R, we move down to V and over to discover E and so on. When we have replaced all the coded letters with their true counterparts, we are left with the completed solution:

DEPP AS THE MAD HATTER REMINDS GEEKDAD OF DEPP AS WILLY WONKA

And judging from the e-mails, a lot of you agree with us. Congratulations to everyone who got the solution and check back soon because Dave Giancaspro, who’s madder than the Hatter, himself, is brewing up something special for next week’s puzzle. Until then, I’ll leave you with this Carroll riddle: Why is a raven like a writing desk?