Shades of Alan Turing (2)

Well, he has replied, and I'm flattered.

Mr. Lambert,

Yes, the story is on the web site. As part of my computer security class, I teach different methods of encryption. My current programming assignment asks students to build a program that automatically decrypts texts written in English. You can see the statement of the problem at http://www.csee.wvu.edu/~cukic/Security. Your text is one of the seven students use to evaluate the decryption performance.

I must have downloaded your story several years ago, but I am not sure where from (it may have been NYT literary section). It is rather a coincidence that I use it for a "geeky" computer science class assignment. I hope you don't mind.

Regards,

Bojan

Shades of Alan Turing

Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery but unacknowledged plagiarism can leave a slightly bitter taste in the first begetter's mouth. In mine, at least. A story I wrote some years ago, called SOAP, has popped up in a number of places after being published by the online magazine East of the Web.

Generally they're student crib sites where for every 1,000 words you copy you have to provide a 1,000 words of new material. I suspect this is true of this site, which doesn't seem to open any longer, though I may be wrong. The story obviously has no value in terms of student assignment, so it's both a random and an innocuous sort of intellectual theft, and not worth bothering about.

But I'm more intrigued by this site, owned by Doctor Bojan Cukic of West Virginia University. As professor of computer science and electrical engineering, he seems to have used my story to develop some kind of code based on sequences of six letters. I've written to ask him what he's up to.

I'll let you know if he replies.