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Deciphering the ruling was easier

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published April 29, 2006

The judge's riddle, quietly inserted into his Da Vinci Code decision, had London intrigued.

LONDON - The code has been cracked.

London lawyer Dan Tench and the Times newspaper on Friday claimed to have solved the riddle of a code embedded in a judge's ruling in The Da Vinci Code copyright lawsuit.

It reads: "Jackie Fisher who are you dreadnought."

The message was created by Peter Smith, the High Court judge who presided over the copyright infringement suit brought by authors of the nonfiction book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail against the publisher of Dan Brown's mega-selling thriller.

Smith's entry in the society bible Who's Who lists him as a fan of John "Jackie" Fisher, a 19th century admiral who modernized the British navy and developed its first modern warship, the dreadnought.

London's legal world has been in a whirl since it was revealed this week that Smith encoded a message within the 71-page judgment that Brown had not copied from the earlier work. A sequence of italicized letters was sprinkled throughout the text, with the first 10 spelling out "Smithy code."

The rest of the letters seemed random: jaeiextostgpsacgreamqwfkadpmqzvz.

Tench, who brought the code to the world's attention last week, said the key lay within the pages of Brown's thriller.

At one point Brown's cryptographer hero Robert Langdon explains the Fibonacci sequence - a mathematical progression that involves adding a number to the two numbers before, so that 1 is followed by 1, then 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, etc. That sequence, when repeated and substituted with letters from the alphabet, spells out the cryptic message.

Smith, 53, said he inserted the code only for his own pleasure.

"The answer has nothing to do with the case," he said.

Text of a statement by Justice Peter Smith on the coded message inserted into his ruling in The Da Vinci Code suit, which was released Friday by the Judicial Communications Office:

DA VINCI CODE HINTS

1. HBHG refers to the Dossiers Secret and the hidden message. It is revealed by spotting that certain random letters appear to be different in form from the majority of the text.

2. Applying that to the judgment reveals the following highlighted letters:

SMITHYCODEJAEIEXTOSTGP

SACGREAMQWFKADPMQZVZ

(the first part reveals there is

a message)

3. There is no significance to the placing of the letters in the text.

4. DVC also uses codes. The most liked one is apparently a numerical one (p.255 The Fibonacci Sequence). In the book it is changed.

5. The correct sequence up to 21 is:

1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21

6. The code is created by letter substitution.

7. The letter change is creating by applying the Fibonacci Sequence numbers above letter by letter.

8. The relevant number shows where you start for each letter to substitute. Thus the first letter is identified by rewriting the alphabet stating at the first letter in the alphabet ie for the first letter A

A. The second letter is also started at 1; the third at 3. When 21 is reached the code reverts back to 1 etc and repeats that until all the letters are substituted. A message ought then be revealed (there is a deliberate typo to create further confusion). The message reveals a significant but now overlooked event that occurred virtually 100 years to the day of the start of the trial.

9. The preparation of the Code took about 40 minutes and its insertion another 40 minutes or so.

10. I hate crosswords and do not do Sudoku as I do not have the patience.

Peter Smith

28th April 2006

[Last modified April 29, 2006, 01:18:13]