Inq's Cipher Wheel

welcome to 415 14-7 it's time for Michael's toys I'm your host Michael and in this show we talk about toys that belong to me except today we're going to be talking about a toy that I designed and it could be yours so long as you are a subscriber to the curiosity box what's the toy well it's my special version of a cipher wheel I call it inks cipher wheel who is ink well ink is an anthropomorphic octopus the ink stands for inquisitive that sinks full name ink did not design this wheel but I wanted ink to get a little bit of credit you see ink is sort of the fourth Vsauce host Jake Kevin and I can talk and show things we make videos we do live performances but ink is all about hands-on learning which is what the Curiosity box is all about now this wheel is based on the Mexican Army cipher wheel that was in use a long time ago it may have even been used by Santa Ana during the Battle of the Alamo I was 182 years ago but this version inks cipher wheel has a little bit of a twist I wasn't happy just making one that was a replica of the old cipher wheel this one well let's just get into using it and I think it'll be clear how it's used and what makes it special the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna grab this bucket that I filled with slips of paper that have all kinds of different words on them it also contains a little mini ink by the way technically the plural of octopus is either octopuses or our top ATI's octopi no it's a latinized greek word octopus which by the way since octopus means eight feet does that mean that I am a bi puss or a dye post's dye puzzle yes it does let's pick a word which word will I pick lots of choices okay great we've got a word and this is the word that we are going to be encrypting I picked the word corn okay perfect corn will be today's plaintext and unencrypted work now to encrypt it we're going to use our cipher wheel and we're going to change every character in the word corn into a symbol let's take a look at the wheel you'll notice that there are one two three four five concentric circles the outer circle contains letters and the inner four contain symbols now you can rotate these circles however much you want but once you've got a position that you like it's locked in and you're ready to encrypt notice that every single letter corresponds to four unique symbols on the circles above it these symbols are what you can encrypt the plaintext letter into but what are these symbols mean they look a little bit strange now a few of you watching out there might already have a bit of a hunch but I'm going to tell you the secret today in this episode all of these symbols are made out of the same ten figures these are the ten figures one two three four five six seven eight nine ten by numbering them off I gave away what they stand for they might not look like numerals but when you start thinking about mirror reflections it might make more sense watch what happens when I cover up one half of each symbol along this line of symmetry one two three four five six seven eight nine and zero every numeral is there by combining these all the way around the cipher wheel I was able to create a pretty neat looking device so let's find the first number which is zero one zero one is on the outer circle the outermost circle that has symbols on it there it is right now it corresponds to X and then we have two three four five and so on all the way up to ninety-nine one hundred and then v1 v2 v3 and Inc okay perfect so let's start encrypting the word tor all I need to do is set up my wheels into some initial position it can anything that I want so long as my intended recipient also knows how to set up their wheel in the same way so that it's easy for them to decrypt what I have made secret all right so let's begin with the word corn we begin with the letter C the letter C corresponds to 20 350 57 and 87 now I can choose any one of those four and I can write it down as either a number using Arabic numerals or I can do it by just writing down the actual symbol it's your choice I'm gonna go ahead and write down the symbols and I'm gonna pick 57 I like that so 57 looks like this and then sort of an upside-down triangle all right so that's the C now oh let me look for o notice that it's very important that you don't rotate the rings while you're encrypting because you want to keep this in the same state okay now o can be represented as 936 69 or 99 ooh you know what I think I'm gonna go with 99 I like how 99 looks like two little faces maybe I don't know not how not so much the way I draw it but there's 99 then are the letter R can be twelve thirty nine 72 or V two you know what I'm gonna pick I'm gonna pick 12 because I just love the letter M stands for Michael obviously and an underlined heart which is love but with an emphasis all right now finally the letter n now n corresponds to any one of these four that I want 8:35 68 or 98 I'm gonna pick 35 I like that 30 and then the five is like this I almost ran out of room but I still succeeded in encrypting the word corn corn is my plaintext this is my ciphertext so if anyone else has their wheel set exactly like mine they can decode this mess they just locate each individual number and then find that number on their wheel identically set to mine so the first one is 57 right here and it corresponds to the letter C and 99 of course corresponds to where's 99 99 is over here it corresponds to O and so on corn can be found now how do you make sure that your intended recipient knows how to set up their wheel to match yours well you can figure out whatever method that you want either you and your secret spy pal can agree beforehand on the appropriate setting for your wheels or you could just use a different setting every time but embed a key in your message that lets the recipient know how to set their wheels one way to do that would be to simply pick one letter either a letter that you have both agreed will be the key letter or you can actually just pick one that you want and write it down so for instance in this message I could say alright this is the position of my wheel and in this case the letter J aligns with for oops that's on how you write for 31 a 65 and finally 95 okay now this can begin your message and allow your recipient to know how to set their wheel another way that I like a lot is to agree on some initial position of the wheel for instance perhaps the letter A is tied to the very lowest number on each wheel in the case of this first wheel that would be 0 1 where is 0 1 there it is ok and then obviously this means that Z is associated with 26 and so on the next wheel up a would be associated with the next number which is 27 there's 27 and so on now from that initial position you can then instruct your recipient to turn each wheel a certain number of times for instance let's just say that you pick the date or the time that you wrote your message that way it looks like you're just dating the message but really that date or time contains the key so for instance right now it is 1050 so I could just write down 1050 that looks like a time to someone who's trying to spy on my secrets this is the time but your intended recipient will know to pay a lot of attention to the time or date or whatever you decide to encode this key in so in this case if you put your key in the time they will know to set the wheel in a certain initial way and then turn each wheel according to these numbers for instance the first wheel up from the letters is turned once clockwise or out anti-clockwise however you guys have agreed beforehand there's one turn the next wheel up is turned zero times the third wheel is turned five times clockwise and the final wheel is turned zero times and perfect now it's all set up you can be as creative as you want in disguising these messages by the way one thing I really really love about these symbols is that because they're based on mirror symmetry you can read them all in a mirror and they still make sense for instance in a mirror to will look like this boy I'm not a very good drawer but here's that line of reflection too just looks like 20 it's still legible as a number using our code if your recipient knows to look in a mirror but no one else does even other people who know about this wheel well then you're one step ahead of those unauthorized users aren't you that my friends is inks cipher wheel I'm very excited about it it and a whole bunch of other stuff that I'm not gonna show you come in the latest curiosity box I can't show you everything that comes in the box because well then it wouldn't be a curiosity box it would just be a I know what's in it box I will give you one more peek at what's inside this current box which is box number eight by the way we've we've made this and we've now done eight of these this shirt this shirt comes in the box I designed this along with the brilliant designer John laser who helped me on the mysterium cosmic graphic I'm sure I love depictions of the history of our universe but a lot of them stop at present day so I said John I want to make one that goes from the Big Bang to one possible way our universe could end my favorite way is the heat death and so we work together on this shirt which gives you an expanding cone representing an expanding universe with dates along the side this side right here that tell you the age the universe will be around when these different events happen we've got the Big Bang at zero then we have moving through time lots of stuff happens uh-oh the Sun becomes a red giant perhaps it destroys the earth at that point but if it doesn't the earth still exists but the Sun becomes a white dwarf then over time the Earth's orbit decays the Sun turns into a black dwarf they cut they collide and then eventually we reach the top of this design the heat death of the universe a point about Google years in the future when energy will be the same everywhere and no work will be able to be done the universe will have died in a heap death see you there and as always thanks for watching thanks for listening to me talk about the curiosity box I am very proud of this I was very lucky growing up as a kid I was surrounded by science and math toys and I mean my dad loved them so he loved collecting them for himself but then I would play with them anyway now I have a chance to give those toys to you but this box isn't just good for your brain it is good for everyone's brain because a portion of all proceeds goes to Alzheimer's research so far the Curiosity box has raised more than a hundred thousand dollars for Alzheimer's research and that's my favorite part of this box so thank you for watching and thank you for supporting brains and as always thanks for watching I'm choosing a lot from the top wheel but you know what I can do what I want okay so here we go take that away get rid of this message and we're left with this string of symbols now to sum it up there's someone who doesn't know the code

Channel: D!NG

Views: 1,138,184

Rating: 4.8912153 out of 5

Keywords: lut, vsauce, vsauce2, vsauce3, michael stevens, kevin lieber, jake roper, cipher wheel, decipher, cipher, cryptography, spies, spy, code, symbol, encrypt, decrypt, octopus, sea animals, curiosity, learn, knowledge, math, science, ding, d!ng, dingsauce

Id: TvsiLV7RLx4

Length: 13min 6sec (786 seconds)

Published: Fri May 25 2018