Research

Hacking Rongo: Classical and Quantum Cryptanalytic Approaches to Easter Island's Undeciphered Script

Current Findings

Thirteen statistically significant repeated sequences across twenty tablets, two of which constitute "holy grail" diachronic candidates exhibiting consistent sign substitutions across the 1722 CE European contact boundary, one holding across seven independent post-contact tablets. Three quantum algorithms confirmed on IBM Quantum hardware (ibm_marrakesh, Heron r2, 156 qubits): Simon's algorithm recovering the diachronic key-change period from both holy grail passages, Bernstein-Vazirani recovering hidden structure in the sign-frequency distribution in one quantum query versus 16,384 classical, and QAOA searching a scoped phoneme-assignment subproblem with variational optimization converging over 28 hardware iterations. This is the first quantum cryptanalysis of any undeciphered script and the first empirical quantum hardness certificate for a decipherment problem.

Unique Approach

The Rongorongo script is the only known independently invented writing system of Oceania, and has resisted decipherment for 160 years. This project treats Rongorongo not as a linguistic puzzle but as a cryptographic one. The glyphs are ciphertext and the underlying language is the plaintext. The mapping between them is the key and every tool in the pipeline has a direct cryptanalytic equivalent.

The critical innovations are diachronic corpus stratification using Ferrara et al.'s 2024 radiocarbon dates as a known key-change boundary, and the application of quantum algorithms of Simon, Bernstein-Vazirani, and QAOA to directly attack the decipherment keyspace on real quantum hardware. No prior computational study has applied either approach.

Hacking Rongo Project

Visit: https://github.com/sperkswerks-ai/hackingrongo