Use Bacon’s code, as given in Example, to decode DO YOU KNOW THAT THE NUMBER PI IS NOW KNO...

Use Bacon’s code, as given in Example, to decode DO YOU KNOW THAT THE NUMBER PI IS NOW KNOWN TO MORE THAN FOUR HUNDRED MILLION DECIMAL PLACES.

Example

As an example of cryptology, we consider a remarkable code due to Sir Francis Bacon, the English writer and philosopher. Suppose that we wish to encode a message, say FLEE NOW. We first write the base 2 representation of the position of each letter of the message in the English alphabet, starting with A in position 0, and ending with Z in position 25. Thus we have the following table.

Since F is in position 5, its binary representation is (00101)2, and so on. Now choose an unrelated “dummy” message exactly five times as long (padded with a few extra letters if necessary). Place the dummy message in a third row. The letters of the dummy message correspond exactly to the string of 0’s and 1’s in the second row of the above table. We agree to write each letter in one font (say Times Roman) if it corresponds to a 0 in the table, and another font (say Times Roman Italic) if it corresponds to a 1 (Bacon used fonts that were even more similar). Thus if the dummy message is ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST THERE WAS A TOWN, we would write that message as ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST THERE WAS A TOWN. Note that when the letters in this message are arranged in a third row of the table, the patterns of nonitalic for 0 and italic for 1 allow us to decode the message.