Chance and good luck in cryptography

Chance and good luck in cryptography are the unpredictable elements that meet, frustrate, and sometimes complete painstaking codebreaking. In the novel, a cryptanalyst may need intelligence, patience, and ingenuity to reach a cipher’s hidden structure, yet success can still turn on an error, a lucky discovery, or a key that is no key at all. The resulting breakthroughs are neither wholly earned nor simply accidental: they emerge where disciplined labor encounters what cannot be planned.

The limits of method

The ordinary approach to cryptography is described as a slow process of elimination. Agents gather relevant information; the cryptanalyst forms hypotheses and tests them, effectively making keys and doors until one combination opens a way forward. The method is laborious, shaped by the amount of available material and by the analyst’s sensitivity to the cipher, but it is also described as safe, secure, effective, and especially useful against high-level codes. Its reliability does not make it effortless: the search can expand across an apparently limitless field of possibilities.

That method gives chance a precise role. A cryptanalyst can construct and test keys, but cannot know in advance when a useful one will appear—at the beginning, midway through, or near the end of the work. The search is therefore not a sequence in which intelligence guarantees a predictable result. Its possibilities are held open by ingenuity, while the timing of success remains a matter of serendipity.

The novel also links uncertainty to the scarcity of visible mistakes. A cipher may seem like a seamless net, but once used it can betray its maker through slips, compared to droplets of blood opening a small gap. The cryptanalyst’s task is to notice and enter such an opening. Yet there is no dependable schedule for a slip, and the hope that an opponent will make one is described as both absurd and sorrowful. The work depends on human fallibility while offering no assurance about when, or whether, that fallibility will become legible.

Labor, isolation, and fortune

Chance does not spare the cryptanalyst the work of reaching the point where luck can matter. Rong Jinzhen spends a year trying possible keys for BLACK before his notebook goes missing. The account emphasizes the scale of that sustained effort: a capable cryptanalyst must be able to imagine an effectively unlimited number of keys, though no one can tell which will work or when it will be found. Serendipity can decide the moment of discovery, but only within a search already shaped by thought and persistence.

Rong Jinzhen’s diligence is paired with solitude. The novel depicts him advancing through cryptography’s narrow passages on two supports: work and isolation. His loneliness hardens his mind and soul, while his diligence enables him to reach beyond what he already knows. Good fortune is presented as hidden in the lines of his notebook, making that object more than a record of thought: it holds traces of the labor through which an unexpected opening might become useful. When the notebook is lost, the possibility it contains is suddenly exposed to interruption.

This vision of luck resists treating fortune as something one can summon by wishing for it. It is invisible, untouchable, and not obliged to wait for a person. Yet the account does not make luck supernatural proof of a cryptanalyst’s power. Instead, it connects fortune to an exacting practice whose outcome cannot be calculated in advance. Chance remains elusive, but its effects are tangible: a discovery can alter the course of a search, while its absence can leave years of effort unresolved.

Breakthroughs and reversals

Klaus Johannes’s breaking of EAGLE provides an exceptional instance of success arriving with startling speed. He needs only seven months to crack a cipher said to be secure for thirty years and to surpass other ciphers of its time by a remarkable margin. The achievement is described as unique, almost as implausible as the sun rising in the west. The novel leaves open whether the result should be credited to genius or good luck, presenting the two as difficult to separate in a field where even extraordinary skill cannot make success predictable.

BLACK offers a sharper reversal. For years Rong Jinzhen waits for a weakness to open in the cipher and finds no errors; the expected slips seem to pass through his hands. Meanwhile, the earlier breaking of PURPLE has made the opposing side more cautious, encouraging those who open the cipher to avoid letting information leak. The account also raises the possibility that Liseiwicz, who understood Rong Jinzhen’s skill, could have warned BLACK’s creators and helped them devise countermeasures. Here chance is not merely a fortunate opening: the adversary’s knowledge and precautions can narrow the openings on which an analyst depends.

The eventual solution comes by a route that unsettles the usual image of cryptanalytic triumph. Director Zheng recalls working late in an underground office and using a calculator capable of more than forty thousand calculations to test his assumption. He finds that BLACK’s key is zero, associated with the leather attaché case; what had seemed a locked door turns out to be a false façade that can simply be pushed open. The revelation appears almost unreal even to the person who makes it. Its very simplicity makes it hard to trust, although the door opens and the cipher is exposed.

What luck means in cryptography

The BLACK solution is not presented as Director Zheng’s achievement alone. He credits Rong Jinzhen’s notebook with carrying him to the discovery, and describes the result as a mixture of hard work and luck. This shifts the meaning of a breakthrough away from solitary mastery: one person’s accumulated thought can become another person’s means of seeing what was hidden. The notebook preserves the labor that makes the apparently improbable solution reachable, even as its loss and recovery place that labor within a precarious chain of events.

Across EAGLE and BLACK, fortune has two opposed powers. It can create everything, producing a solution where the effort seemed trapped; it can also destroy everything, because the timing and direction of a lucky turn cannot be controlled. The novel’s account therefore refuses both the idea that genius alone guarantees success and the idea that a lucky accident makes skill irrelevant. Cryptanalysis requires ingenuity and good fortune in equal measure, but their meeting cannot be scheduled. That uncertainty is not incidental to the work. It is part of what makes the pursuit both possible and heartbreaking.