By DEREK KRAVITZ
The Associated Press
Thursday, April 27, 2006; 7:12 PM

LONDON -- Parts of London's legal community ground to a virtual halt Thursday with lawyers turning into aspiring code-breakers as they tried to decipher a hidden message inserted into "The Da Vinci Code" trial judgment.

With the revelation that Judge Peter Smith inserted a secret code of his own into the April 7 judgment that cleared "The Da Vinci Code" author Dan Brown in his copyright infringement case, lawyers have been hustling to solve the puzzle.
 
Since the code was discovered earlier this week, lawyers, cryptographers and "The Da Vinci Code" fans have worked furiously to decipher the mystery message.

"It's so short," U.S. cryptographer Elonka Dunin, of St. Charles, Mo., said of Smith's code. "It's only a tiny snippet. If it were a few pages of code, it'd already be cracked."

Dunin said this type of code has no word divisions and is normally 75 to 100 characters. Smith's code offers roughly 30 cryptic letters.

But despite her frustration, Dunin said the judge has left some clues.

The New York Times reported that Smith sent an e-mail to a reporter at the newspaper that offered a hint. It said the code referred to his entry in this year's edition of Britain's "Who's Who," which has references to his wife, Diane, his three children, British naval officer Jackie Fisher, and the Titanic Historical Society _ among other things.

"With the crypto community's attention turning toward this code, it'll be cracked within 24 hours," Dunin said.

The reporter got things mostly right. I said it *might* be a patristocrat cipher, but it turned out to be a kind of polyalphabetic substitution, using the Fibonacci sequence as a key. It did indeed, however, fall within 24 hours. The prize goes to Daniel Tench, a London attorney who'd already been working on it for a couple weeks (see his column in The Guardian).

I'm also laughing because I couldn't have asked for better book promotion. My "Mammoth Book of Secret Codes" was just released in the U.K. today (Thursday). If it weren't for the fact that I know better, I'd wonder if it was a secret conspiracy....

Elonka :)