&gt; Hammer did not get especially far, but concluded that the patterns in the two undeciphered notes seemed to be non-random.<p>I wonder if there&#x27;s any research into the kinds of sequences that feel random, as opposed to those that actually are. There&#x27;s an old story of a stats professor who assigns students to either flip a coin 100 times or just make up a sequence of 100 heads or tails, and invariably the two are distinguishable based on, for example, run lengths. Similarly, I could imagine that &quot;Beale&quot; just made up numbers, rather than randomizing them well.