Fringe Code Cracked!

Posted by docarzt on April 9th, 2009 - (7) Comments

(Image from Fringetelevision.com) Brainiac Julian Sanchez has cracked the Fringe secret alphabet!  Didn’t know there was one?  Well read on for all of the fascinating details.

From Julian’s Blog:

Within the last week, two things happened: I finally got around to checking out the Fox show Fringe, the first season of which I noticed sitting tantalizingly in the Playstation Store, and my Ars colleague Erica Sadun wrote an article exploring all the delightful little Easter eggs sprinkled throughout the show. In particular she devotes some special attention to the so-called “glyph code”—a series of weird images flanked by glowing dots that appear as interstitial bumpers before commercial breaks. If I hadn’t been way nerdy for crypto before I started writing about the NSA habitually, that certainly pushed me over the edge, and I couldn’t resist taking a stab myself.

Now, here’s the part that pains me just a bit: Erica did a whole bunch of work that ultimately enabled me to crack the thing in a couple of minutes, but stopped just a hair short of the solution.  From where she left off, it’s actually incredibly simple once you make one crucial assumption.   Alas, there’s no deep dark mystery about the show’s arc concealed here, and the solution’s actually a bit anticlimactic, but it’s below the fold for those who are interested.

Julian’s work has so-far yielded the following list:

1: OBSERVER
2: CHILD
3: AEGER [? -- AETHER would make more sense for the episode]
4: ROGUE
5: SURGG [should be SURGE?]
6: CELLS
7: CODES
8: TAKEN
9: VOICE
10: TRADE
11: SAVED
12: BISHOP
13: AVIAN
14: OLIVIA

(Thanks to Axel for the heads up!)