Science Archives - Anton Hoyer

Billennium

Anton Hoyer — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 20:00:00 +0000

Background This cellular automaton is a gift for my sister, who wanted art for her birthday. For the sole reason of being cryptic, I hid the easter egg ⓝⓐⓝⓞⓒⓛⓞⓤⓣ in there, meaning “tiny influence,” a reference to her moniker on Instagram. However, Billennium also is heavily inspired by a previous ant colony simulation I developed […]

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Arcturus: Not a Cipher

Anton Hoyer — Sun, 27 Jul 2025 20:00:00 +0000

Introduction If you are into cryptology like me you probably agree that ciphers and codes become a lot more intriguing if their authors are infamous. The best-known examples are the letters sent to press and police between 1969 and 1970 by the Zodiac Killer. Even though the chances of actually decoding these ciphers are slim, […]

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Caqr

Anton Hoyer — Sun, 15 Jun 2025 20:00:00 +0000

For a long time, I was unsure whether I even wanted to write about this project or simply sweep it under the rug. Because what is the best advice for someone who wants to develop a modern and secure cryptosystem? Don’t do it. Nobody needs it. There are plenty of fast, secure, elegantly simple, and […]

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WordLoom

Anton Hoyer — Wed, 11 Jun 2025 20:00:00 +0000

The idea for this project originated when I saw an elderly person on the train solving a word search puzzle. Not that I am into this kind of time killer, but I immediately asked myself how these puzzles could be created automatically with maximum word density. And when I say maximum, I mean, how to […]

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QRfypx

Anton Hoyer — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 17:20:00 +0000

Introduction QR codes are weird, efficient, and ingenious. But the same is said of the Japanese, who invented them. With more humble intentions, I started this project with the idea of rearranging the dark and bright regions of an image to encode information. You can see one of the first attempts below. In this case, […]

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Game of (No) Life

Anton Hoyer — Sat, 08 Jun 2024 20:00:00 +0000

Game of (No) Life is just a fun little environment to play around with Conway’s Game of Life (or “Life” for short). In a nutshell, it is a cellular automaton where cells on a grid live, die, or reproduce based on simple rules. Nevertheless, it can be used to simulate complex patterns and behaviors. This […]

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Pendulo

Anton Hoyer — Wed, 29 May 2024 20:00:00 +0000

Introduction True randomness, as unachievable as it seems, would revolutionize the world of cryptography because attackers could no longer make predictions. Forget the pseudo-random number generators that rely on timing and user hardware, as they are not cryptographically secure. Better are systems based on physical processes, for example, radioactive decay or filming 100 lava lamps […]

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Polar Cipher

Anton Hoyer — Sun, 05 May 2024 20:00:00 +0000

This encryption method was loosely inspired by the 2016 science fiction movie “Arrival,” in which the alien species uses a visual language composed of circular ink blots to form words and sentences. Since I am a fan of polar coordinates, a mathematical system often used to describe circular motions in orbital mechanics, I decided to […]

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Caidoz

Anton Hoyer — Wed, 14 Feb 2024 20:00:00 +0000

This monoalphabetic substitution alphabet was inspired by the Zodiac Killer’s cryptograms. If you are not familiar with them, in addition to the Latin alphabet, he used several symbols, such as triangles, half-filled rectangles, and mirrored letters. While his cipher was homophonic to throw codebreakers off, meaning that one plaintext letter could have more than one […]

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Babaism

Anton Hoyer — Wed, 15 Nov 2023 20:00:00 +0000

Technically speaking, this project is not purely cryptographic as it was developed to produce experimental poetry. However, the final result could be considered a mild computer virus, so I placed it under science instead of literature. In a nutshell, Babaism is an algorithm that goes over an existing text and replaces words with similar looking […]

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Boonish

Anton Hoyer — Sun, 01 Oct 2023 20:00:00 +0000

“Teo! Tėp? Gōa bȧognā bōoo lā’hēo. Gȯo hoȧ haān’bȧan? Mēp-bla” — William S. Burroughs Background This substitution cipher was inspired by the hallucinatory writings found in AI-generated images. Typically, the AI attempts to integrate words from the user prompt into the image, often inventing new words or even letters. To an outsider like myself, those […]

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Delaunay Explosion

Anton Hoyer — Fri, 02 Jun 2023 20:00:00 +0000

This little accident happened while I was developing a MATLAB script for my dissertation. The script was intended to model the positions of abrasive filaments based on an experimentally measured 2D pointset. In particular, I examined the histogram of distances between neighboring filaments. To achieve this, I computed the Delaunay triangulation of the pointset, a […]

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Bridgeman

Anton Hoyer — Fri, 21 Apr 2023 20:00:00 +0000

This encryption method is based on a standard deck of 52 cards and can be used with pen and paper or a computer. The default order of the deck is clubs (♣), diamonds (♦), hearts (♥), spades (♠). Within each suit, the cards are ordered as ace (A), two (2), three (3), four (4), five (5), six (6), seven (7), eight (8), nine (9), ten (0), jack (J), queen (Q), king (K). […]

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Stegano Green

Anton Hoyer — Sun, 18 Sep 2022 20:00:00 +0000

Steganography is the practice of concealing a message, file, or information within another message, file, or piece of information in such a way that it remains invisible to anyone who is not intended to see it. The image depicted below, with dimensions 689 × 462, contains all 21,118 characters of the text “Dermatoglyphics,” hidden in […]

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Lexigraph

Anton Hoyer — Fri, 19 Aug 2022 20:00:00 +0000

This symmetric encryption method is based on a dictionary, technically making it a nomenclator cipher. In fact, any digital dictionary can be used, the larger the better. I work with one that consists of several smaller dictionaries from various sources and contains 466,480 words in total. Consequently, the resulting ciphertexts are a jumble of different […]

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Speedcube

Anton Hoyer — Mon, 30 May 2022 20:00:00 +0000

Plaintext “In secret, I gaze at you, behold something holy. But this time a song won’t do to ground my soul.” IN SECRET I GAZE AT YOU BEHOLD SOMETHING HOLY BUT THIS TIME A SONG WONT DO TO GROUND MY SOUL Solved cube This substitution cipher was inspired by the Rubik’s Cube, a popular 3D […]

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PN Trajectory

Anton Hoyer — Tue, 15 Jun 2021 20:00:00 +0000

“PN Trajectory,” with “PN” standing for “polynomial,” is an educational game designed to alleviate anxiety in people who view math as their adversary ever since numbers were replaced by letters. Specifically, as a player, you control a cannon and need to shoot at a target, which strangely resembles the Royal Air Force roundel. The challenge: […]

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Brushing MBS

Anton Hoyer — Thu, 01 Nov 2018 20:00:00 +0000

This is one of the few projects that I spent several years on, and I doubt that I will ever develop something as difficult. The years are 2015 to 2018, and while I had a decent amount of coding experience with Visual Basic and C, this is the one project that taught me how to […]

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AntNation

Anton Hoyer — Thu, 28 Sep 2017 20:00:00 +0000

I cannot say precisely what drove me to start this project, as it has been a couple of years. Therefore, I will keep it shorter than usual for a project of this scope. “AntNation” (not to be confused by the RTS video game “Ant Nation” by Konami) is a simulation-like environment programmed in MATLAB developed […]

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Brushing DEM

Anton Hoyer — Sat, 28 Sep 2013 19:12:00 +0000

Once I finish my dissertation on the modeling of filament interactions of abrasive brushing tools, I will write a lengthy rundown for this post including lots of pretty pictures. However, it still needs revisions before it can be defended and published. If you are even more impatient than I am, please refer to my published […]

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