At the end of the previous post, I mentioned a suspicion that merely deciphering the correspondences between the glyphs on Fringe and the letters they represent might not be the whole of the glyph puzzle. Being new to the show, I didn’t know a whole lot about it previously, but I did decide to poke around a bit, and found a recent interview with the show’s producer, claiming that the solution to the glyph cipher would “speak to some of the larger controlling mythology behind the show.” Clearly, the words embedded in each episode so far don’t do anything of the sort, suggesting there’s something more to discover.
Possibly that just means that the words encoded in the first season’s episodes are provided mainly as raw data to enable folks to start cracking—using words like “Observer” and “Bishop” makes it easier to run a targeted attack and readily confirms you’ve got the correct key—while in future episodes, the code words will be more informative or provide the basis for a new puzzle. But eyeing the glyph key, there’s some reason to think there’s a second puzzle already built in:
Now remember, the folks behind the show are making up these correspondences. They could’ve matched up glyphs and letters totally randomly. Or they could’ve gone with a more straightforwardly linear pattern: Apples (with shifting dots) for A–D, Flowers for E–H, and so on. Instead they went with this weird-looking hybrid (after last night’s show, we can apparently add “W” which is a mirror image of “V”), clearly somewhat patterned, but with interesting deviations. The first two (all plant!) lines open with “high dot” and “low dot” mirrored pairs of the leaf glyph. On the first line, though, the Apple glyph itself doesn’t mirror shift; only the dot moves. On the second line, the flower is mirrored, and the dot shifts in a different order. Line three looks like it’s getting ready to move from the 2-4 structure to a 2-2-2. And on the last line, the smoky face assigned to T disrupts the symmetrical pairs we’ve come to expect.
To me, that suggests potential information content. A completely patterned key—like a text rearranged with all its characters in alphabetical order—would be low-information. A completely random key assignment would technically be “high information,” but without some underlying structure or pattern, you’d have no basis for extracting any specific meaning from it. The reason “I’m going to go to the fridge and get a beer” is less surprising (and thus “lower information” in the technical sense) than “I’m going to go to the fridge rhinoceros teacup insipidly jellybean ” is that the very meaningfulness of the first set of terms lets you form reasonable expectations about the likely content of the rest of the phrase, based on the assumption that the sentence forms a coherent expression of an idea. The sweet-spot mix of pattern and randomness is what hints at meaning and communication.
So how could this work? Well, those of you who know anything about cryptography know that it’s not only possible to encipher an informative text with a certain cryptographic key, but to embed information in the key itself. So, to pick a very simple example, suppose I create a basic monoalphabetic substitution cipher with the following key: “J=A, U=B, L=C, I=D, A=E, N=F, B=G, C=H, D=I…” Now I can encipher a text with that substitute alphabet, and given a long enough text, a combination of frequency analysis and word-guessing should make it simple enough to crack the code and work backwards to the original key. Anyone who steps back from the particular text and writes down that key in alphabetical order will not only learn the content of the particular enciphered text, but they’ll readily see that I used the word JULIAN as the basis of the substitution cipher. More complex forms of encryption, like the polyalphabetic Vigenère cipher, can also make use of (potentially much longer) keywords or phrases as the basis of their cryptographic keys.
That’s not to say that’s what’s been done here; I just offer it as an example of one way that a cryptographic key can embed information above and beyond that in any particular enciphered text. Someone who wanted to be especially devious could encipher a banal plaintext with the actually significant information embedded in the structure of the key. This key, say, might itself contain another enciphered word, where the letter sequence can be read as (LEAVES)(APPLES)(LEAVES)(FLOWERS)…—or LALF….—though that seems unlikely to be the method here, if only because a single long word doesn’t provide enough raw data for cryptanalysis, unless there’s some other means of guessing the key to the metacipher. If folks want to play with that idea for while, I’d be interested to see if people discover anything. I’m going to leave it for now, but perhaps when we’ve filled out the complete key, I’ll take another look.
25 responses so far ↓
1 Marcus Tee // Apr 9, 2009 at 1:27 pm
Didn’t JJ Abrams do this show?
And didn’t he do Alias? And doesn’t Alias have a code that is shown each time a new location was visited where one letter in the name of the location was highlighted? When you put them all together they too spell something. Has anyone ever cracked that code and if so what the heck did it say?
2 Michael B Sullivan // Apr 9, 2009 at 1:45 pm
Marcus: Yes, yes, and apparently there was some kind of web ARG that had to do with the highlighted letters. Here’s a FAQ for the season 3 version (with a link to the FAQ for the season 1 version).
http://alias.unfiction.com/s3/
(Note that I’m not in that fandom and this is just the result of a Google search.)
3 Phil // Apr 18, 2009 at 8:45 am
The mention of pairs made me think of base pairs in genetics? Could this be a link, since alot of the show is about genetic modification?
4 Derek McGowan // Apr 22, 2009 at 2:42 pm
The bottom line is probably entirely mirrored …
I.E.
Z is a mirror of S
Y is a Mirror of T
X is a mirror of U
W is a mirror of V
Derek
5 Derek McGowan // Apr 22, 2009 at 2:47 pm
Opps, I was wrong, can’t be … look at S and U
6 Ryan // Apr 23, 2009 at 10:03 am
Any chance there is significance that T and Y are twice as wide as all the rest?
Or maybe some benefit to looking at them in pairs? For example, left-right dot pairs? I posted my guess for the complete key on the solution page, so using that and keeping like glyphs together:
BA
HG
CD
EF
IJ
LK
MN
OP
QR
SU
VW
XZ
YT
Meainingless? Probably. Just throwing things against the wall.
7 4thjet // Apr 25, 2009 at 7:15 pm
Y is the mirror image of T…the smoke face turned around with the dot on the bottom left.
So the code for the last show #117 Bad Dreams is BELLY.
Which is the nickname Walter called his assistant William Bell before Walter was put away.
8 Jxta // Apr 28, 2009 at 10:03 pm
Tonight’s episode’s code… E I G H T
9 swooftguy // Apr 30, 2009 at 2:54 pm
What if the glyphs tie in with the “larger controlling mythology behind the show” in a more mathematical way than we’ve considered (or even can without the entire sequence code)? For example, the way the glyphs are patterned may have a direct relation to the Fibonacci sequence. We know this idea has had a great effect on the show, and it could be the “pattern within the pattern” we’re looking for.
10 swooftguy // Apr 30, 2009 at 3:07 pm
I have to admit when I first saw the arrangement of dots within the glyphs I wondered how it would look if you overlayd the entire alphabet in photoshop. Erica Sadum did use this method to try to derive an alphabetic code, but is it possible that the complete cipher stacked may reveal that the dots fall within the pattern of the golden spiral? I like the idea that everything within the show, including these glyphs and their careful arrangement all ties back in to Fibonacci’s work. It would give it such a sense of completion wouldn’t it?
11 god // May 7, 2009 at 3:13 pm
could it be related to Braille?
12 dbmerc // May 9, 2009 at 3:34 pm
Maybe the pairs could be related to the Periodic table of elements….
13 Just me... // May 14, 2009 at 5:41 pm
I was taking a closer look at the seahorse and i think that you can see a golden spiral or a golden square around the belly and neck/spine. Swooftguy may be on to something… Anyway, would be interesting to see your thoughts on this…
14 Liam Alexander // May 17, 2009 at 3:47 pm
Anyone else notice that there are symbols in the opening sequence? They flash pretty quickly so you probably would not always notice them. They appear directly before the “Dark Matter” text.
15 Brad Sedito // Sep 24, 2009 at 9:33 pm
Liam, you’re right. The symbols flash in the opening sequence – I only caught it after slowing it down in my adobe video editing software. I believe theres always four symbols, and I think theyre different for each episode. I havent delved to deeply into it but I think it would bear some significance to the embedded code.
Haha, this beats counting sheep.
16 ShadeyLane // Oct 16, 2009 at 3:06 am
@ Liam and Brad
The glyphs at the beginning are a butterfly, a sea horse, a frog, a flower, and a hand (straight) . The possibilities are:
Butterfly – O – It’s on the smalle wing Left.
Sea Horse N – Lower Dot Right.
Frog – R – Lower Dot Right.
Flower – I or L, no dots. Ruled out the K because the DragonFly wing is on the Left.
Hand – V – It’s standing straight.
Possibilities:
ONRIV
ONRLV
Any meaning? On Riv? On RLV? Roniv, Ronlv, Vonil, Vonrl? Violin? Oh wait, that’s 2 I’s; and I’m kidding. If there’s a meaning,it’s beyond me.
17 224bron // Jan 2, 2010 at 7:18 pm
flower with dot top right definitely = j.
there are symbols within the symbols, like the triangle in the leaf, the embryonic seeds in the apple, the extra finger, the smoke that looks like a face eating another, surely they there for a reason??
18 224bron // Jan 2, 2010 at 7:19 pm
and the omega in the frog.?
19 Gellis // Jan 22, 2010 at 8:24 pm
All of the glyphs have something “odd” about them, that is no secret. The Apple has human embryos for seeds, the face is made of smoke, the seahorse has the Fibonacci sequence on its tail, the frog actually has the Greek letter Phi on its back (which denotes the Fibonacci sequence), the butterfly is made of human bones (in the wings), the hand has an extra finger, the flower has an insect wing for one of its petals, and the leaf has a “golden triangle” (another related symbol for the Golden Ratio or Golden Mean—Fibonacci). I think there may be something to the idea that the dots form a Golden Spiral, anyone tried that yet?
And just a note, the Golden Ratio has been a theme of art, architecture, science and Mathematics since roughly 500 B.C. It is commonly found in nature as well.
20 Gellis // Jan 22, 2010 at 8:26 pm
Oh, and if you’re looking for a collection of all the solutions to the episodes, check this website:
http://fringewiki.fox.com/page/Fringe+Glyph+Code+Key
21 Sahar // Feb 23, 2010 at 12:31 pm
We all seem to have forgotten that the original glyphs included a horn with the golden ratio inscribed on it (1.618….). Perhaps X & Z are mirror images of the horn, rather than the 6-digit palm?
22 Mel // Apr 3, 2010 at 2:14 am
J.J. Abrams was a PHI DELTA THETA member in college and is just embedding the Greek letters in the show to send his appreciation to all the other PDT’s around the world.
23 Greg // Apr 7, 2010 at 8:09 pm
If the symbols are letters and the typewriter is a key prop to communicate between dimensions then…
Try rearranging the symbols into a querty pattern and see if it leads some where?
24 ted // Apr 9, 2010 at 3:01 am
keys on the typewriter? notice that they are only seen in the see through dimention mirror, the symbols show thenselves in the scene backgrounds
25 susan // Apr 9, 2010 at 6:20 am
There is an iota in the frog
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