Prompt:
A typical intro to cryptography might be through Caesar Codes, which might be just offsets, mapping the alphabet to itself shifted left or right by some number of letters, going around a wheel.
This is like a dance, with the drone looking down on two consecutive circles, say women facing out, men facing in. You start with your partner, home position, then the music begins and the men and women go into opposite rotational movements, clockwise and counter-clockwise.
When the music stops, your new partner represents a letter-to-letter mapping, and so forth around the doubled circle. You’ve got yourself a Caesar Code.
The segue here to “word salad” coming from Caesar salad is tempting, given a next stop: a word scramble. Here we map letters to counterparts more arbitrarily than if circles were involved. Start with your partner and now run around wildly until the music stops, and form a new pair. No dancers get added or subtracted so the male-female ratio stays 1:1.
What if we don’t want to divide along gender lines? Who are we asking? It’s up to us. The point is to show off permutations in a group theoretical sense. Every letter and punctuation symbol, including the space character, gets remapped or stays the same. Permutations underlie group theory as the most general operation. To morph is to permute. From morphing arise isomorphisms, homomorphisms, and homeomorphisms… all manner of morphing.
From these examples, we might jump into cryptographic algorithms more generally, and also into hashing, i.e. creating cryptographic signatures from an object. The School of Tomorrow follows the many in going for RSA given its reliance on number theory concepts we want to hit anyway: Fermat’s Little Theorem, Euler’s Theorem, totient, totative, prime and composite. Strangers (relatively prime).
Crypto currency and version control infrastructure follow. Hashes zip blocks together, into chains. Cryptographic impenetrability may not be the point, simply A fits into B seamlessly, and so now we move on. Handshake complete.
What I’d bring into the meme pool at this point are mnemonic systems designed to hang together owing to cleverly optimized links. Memory palaces and like that.
Caesar and Scramble codes are about making the intelligible unintelligible, the visible invisible (in the sense of meaningless) until deciphered on the other end. But memory codes may have the opposite purpose: to render the invisible more amenable to conceptualization.
The optimizations are not about concealing secrets so much as bringing them to light, but then the reader has to learn the language to bring that light to the equations. Flip the switch, and the tunnels become illuminated.
I think in some of these Indiana Jones type movies and/or narratives, what the explorers stumble upon was never about concealment in the conventional sense, any more than the dashboard of a car is attempting to be cagey or coy about what it displays. Yet the driver still needs to know how to read a dashboard, and that doesn’t happen overnight. Learning a language takes time.
