Ars cracks TV Fringe code

Ars go-to guy and cipher expert Julian Sanchez has cracked a code embedded into the TV series Fringe. Here are the details and what the codes mean.

By Erica Sadun

Ars' own Julian Sanchez has deciphered a code embedded into the TV show Fringe. Bad Robot, the production company that created the Fox TV show, has been integrating puzzles and easter eggs into shows like Lost for years. Fringe, its freshman sci-fi/mystery which resumes Tuesday night on Fox, presented a particular challenge to viewers. It integrates a series of visual clues before commercial breaks. Sanchez determined that these images represented a simple cipher, building up to a single word per episode tying into the theme of that show.

Ars first wrote about the Fringe code last week. Building on that background, Sanchez was able to use a "dictionary attack" to create a correspondence between each unique image and a letter of the alphabet. Show clues translated to simple five, six, or eight-letter words like "Observer," "Child," "Bishop," and "Olivia."

On his personal blog, Sanchez writes that the actual solution ended up taking just a few minutes. "[I]t’s actually incredibly simple once you make one crucial assumption," Sanchez stated. That assumption was that the images from each show built up to that single word. "Alas, there’s no deep dark mysteries about the show’s arc concealed here," he added. "And the solution’s actually a bit anticlimactic..."

What Sanchez worked out was a simple monoalphabetic substitution cipher. Each picture shown was a combination of three things: one of eight images (including a butterfly, a seahorse, an apple, and so forth), its orientation (sometimes the image got flipped as if shown in a mirror) and the position of a small glowing yellow dot. Together these items defined one unique letter of the alphabet. Sanchez told Ars that the systematic organization of the reflections and dot positions simplified matters. "Once that's done, it solves itself when you get the wordbreaks right."

Sanchez relates that he had been personally challenged by a friend to see if he could work out the solution, being told that the cipher might not be crackable. "And I'm like, who are you talking to? I'll crack it before bed." Which he did. Referring to the previous Ars post on the subject, he thanked Ars for leaving a last step for him to tackle.

To date, Fringe has aired just 14 episodes. Sanchez's solution defines just 18 of the 26 letters of the alphabet. There's still some minor work to be done should the letters F, J, M, Q, W, X, Y or Z show up. Viewers will be able to continue working out the remaining secret phrases as each of the final six episodes of the season air.

And discovering those words may not be the end of the story. Sanchez suggests that the cipher may just be the first step of the solution. "Think, for instance, of those acrostic puzzles you sometimes see in the New York Times Magazine, where you fill in responses to a series of clues, then rearrange the letters into an adjacent grid to form a quotation," he writes. The words, when considered together, may offer a deeper game.

To aid amateur decoders who plan to watch the show's return to the air tonight, fan site FringeTelevision created a convenient key based on Sanchez's solution, included below.