The Gold-Bug
The discovery of a message in code on a shoreline formerly infested with pirates sends William Legrand and his friends on a hunt for buried treasure.
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1recommend
2mentions
2people
2020–2022years
50% recommend50% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- My first contact with substitution cyphers and frequency analysis was at 11, reading the Gold Bug from Edgar Allan Poe.
I have fond memories of that time, writing and decoding messages with school friends.
I have always assume that a lot of people first contact with criptography was that short story.
- Make sure to read the complete Canon i.e. all 56 short stories and 4 novels (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_of_Sherlock_Holmes).
The stories have actually much to teach one. It was the first place where the power of reasoning starting from a set of data-points was laid out in such a intelligent way. It taught you the importance of thinking in a logical manner. Arthur Conan Doyle was inspired by his professor Joseph Bell from Edinburgh Medical University who used to deduce people's occupations just from observing key physical characteristics. The main idea is to identify the key data-points from the mass of irrelevant data and then draw inferences using logical chain reasoning. If people actually practiced this mode of thinking then the World would be a far better place i.e. understand inferential statistical thinking, less scams etc.
As a followup you should also read Edgar Allan Poe's four short stories; three of them featuring Auguste Dupin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._Auguste_Dupin) and another named "The Gold Bug". They were an inspiration to Arthur Conan Doyle's creation of Sherlock Holmes and he mentions this in "A Study in Scarlet".
