The image above shows a cutting from a wiki, it is headed ICCF which I think stands for 'International Chess Federation". The numbers you see therein represent chess moves, there were many ways that these moves were described but this method was specifically for chess by correspondence and also, most interestingly, Chess played by radio.
PAKIES CLUB
In July 1947, the renowned Pakies Club played host to such a game of chess by radio between Australia and the UK.
It gets interesting when you realise that when playing chess in this mode, the whole of the transmission is in morse code. Even more interesting when you look at the code page:
Each of the first 4 lines begins with the letter 'M' in two distinct styles. In the Gringmuth notation/code, the letter M represents the Black and what follows in each line is a potentially a series of chess moves. But, what about the numbers? Where are they? See below, the numbers are in the ICCF code and hidden inside each letter.
Our friend Fedor Nosov a TASS journalist and spy, often played chess and was a frequent visitor to Pakies not to mention of course his 1947 visit to South Australia to talk about, amongst other things, the game of chess.
This fascinating piece of information has come to me via a long-term follower of this blog, Rowan, and many thanks to him not only for this most interesting detail but also more which we will publish in due course. This will hopefully include a very interesting article written by Rowan, just waiting for final permissions.
Before anyone gets overly excited, Rowan pointed out that he first saw information about the Gringmuth Notation in a 1949 article about the Somerton Man and the work done by a number of amateur code breakers at that time. They did not succeed in cracking the code, but then again, they were not aware of what lay hidden within each letter.
The next step from here is to connect with suitably qualified code/cypher people and see what if anything can be recovered that matches this coding method.
Whilst I have spent a good deal of time examining the page and its content, it has always puzzled me why the code was written the way it is, surely if someone wanted to write in microcode they would have hidden it within a normal letter or a poem as indeed was the case with Verse 70.
This new information now opens up the possibility that the reason why it was a series of letters is that the person who wrote it was recording a series of chess moves the details of which were coming over the radio and in morse code:
Before anyone gets overly excited, Rowan pointed out that he first saw information about the Gringmuth Notation in a 1949 article about the Somerton Man and the work done by a number of amateur code breakers at that time. They did not succeed in cracking the code, but then again, they were not aware of what lay hidden within each letter.
The next step from here is to connect with suitably qualified code/cypher people and see what if anything can be recovered that matches this coding method.
Whilst I have spent a good deal of time examining the page and its content, it has always puzzled me why the code was written the way it is, surely if someone wanted to write in microcode they would have hidden it within a normal letter or a poem as indeed was the case with Verse 70.
This new information now opens up the possibility that the reason why it was a series of letters is that the person who wrote it was recording a series of chess moves the details of which were coming over the radio and in morse code:
Those who have had experience at using morse code would know that when receiving a message you didn't write down the dots and dashes, you translated them on the fly into letters or numbers.