1. Hamptonese1 Hamptonese and Hidden Markov Models or When is a Cipher not a Cipher? Ethan Le and Mark Stamp Department of Computer Science San Jose State University

2. Hamptonese2 This Talk…  James Hampton  Hamptonese  Hidden Markov Models (HMMs)  HMMs and Hamptonese  Conclusions/Questions

3. Hamptonese3 James Hampton  Served in Pacific in WWII  Washington, DC janitor  Dispensationalism  Died 1964  “Throne” discovered after his death  “Hamptonese” script also found

4. Hamptonese4 The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly

5. Hamptonese5 Hampton’s Throne

6. Hamptonese6

7. 7 What is Hamptonese?  Where do characters come from?  Is it a cipher?  Is it gibberish? m Speaking in tongues?  Martian? [1]  Other?

8. Hamptonese8 Hidden Markov Models  Markov process with hidden states [2]

9. Hamptonese9 HMMs (cont)  Markov process depends on A and X 0  O i related to X i by the B matrix  Three solvable problems 1. Find probability of observed sequence 2. Find “optimal” state sequence 3. Train the model to fit observations (discrete hill climb)

10. Hamptonese10 HMM Examples  Speech recognition  iTunes tool  English text, Cave and Neuwirth [3] m 27 symbols (letters plus word space) m Assume 2 hidden states m Train model to best fit data m Results?

11. Hamptonese11 HMM Example (cont) B matrix

12. Hamptonese12 HMM and Hamptonese  Transcribed all 100 pages [4]  More than 30,000 observations  More than 40 distinct symbols  Assume 2 hidden states  Try HMM to separate symbols into states (hill climb)

13. Hamptonese13 Results  Hamptonese not a simple substitution for English letters  Probably not a simple substitution for any other language

14. Hamptonese14 Last Words  When is a “cipher” not a cipher?  Maybe we can say oHamptonese is not a good cipher oWe can (probably) break a bad cipher oWe cannot “break” Hamptonese… oSo Hamptonese is probably not a cipher

15. Hamptonese15 References [1] A. G. Hefner, “Smith, Helene”, http://www.themystica.com/mystica/articles/s/smith_helene.html http://www.themystica.com/mystica/articles/s/smith_helene.html [2] M. Stamp, “A revealing introduction to hidden Markov models”, http://www.cs.sjsu.edu/faculty/stamp/Hampton/HMM.pdf http://www.cs.sjsu.edu/faculty/stamp/Hampton/HMM.pdf [3] R.L. Cave and L.P. Neuwirth, “Hidden Markov models for English”, in Hidden Markov Models for Speech, IDA- CRD, Princeton, NJ, 1980 [4] M. Stamp and E. Le, “Hamptonese”, http://www.cs.sjsu.edu/faculty/stamp/Hampton/hampton.html