Visual Aid
Wednesday, 10-Nov-1999 08:03:07
208.214.188.4 writes:
Do not if it'll help anyone, but I've reworked the cipher.. Split the couples and highlighted things.. Bold means this couple is
repeated somewhere, as is. Underlined means this couple of repeated somewhere, but inverted.
Hope this goes into a message ok ;)
VY TE SY ED LU TE RV LF NV UH
DW AR DL CF FB SD EW NP XK IC
FT RE OL KA LZ YL SL TO BK EV LY AR
MK RB OD NA LD YP LA ET
OL QA DF HS FZ WN AI DS MU RU OL
HR YL LO TW FY LD IC VL US
VS SF ZY LU NF FX LK TG BC DO BF AL EW
RP FY WL HU LD AR LI
TF LA BF FZ CY FU UF BG
-Tx
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Second Try..
Wednesday, 10-Nov-1999 08:05:35
208.214.188.4 writes:
VY TE SY ED LU TE RV LF NV UH DW AR DL CF FB SD EW NP XK IC
FT RE OL KA LZ YL SL TO BK EV LY AR MK RB OD NA LD YP LA ET
OL QA DF HS FZ WN AI DS MU RU OL HR YL LO TW FY LD IC VL US
VS SF ZY LU NF FX LK TG BC DO BF AL EW RP FY WL HU LD AR LI
TF LA BF FZ CY FU UF BG
-Tx
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The fundamentals
Wednesday, 10-Nov-1999 10:47:25
193.158.164.154 writes:
(good chance to open new thread :)
Just to put it together :
1. a single letter can be set to 5 ciphers
(the 4 in the same row and the one below - which might be (wrapped) at the other end of the table)
2. a duet ?X or X? can have 8 crypted duets (which are in the same row and column of the X)
Gotta take a break. And they really said 'starting with the easy one' LOL
the seeker
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in seek of a new road ...
Wednesday, 10-Nov-1999 11:23:51
195.238.22.113 writes:
Thought this would be a good idea to start a new thread.
Anyway, like I said in my previous post, I am going nowhere, so I think I'm going to restart with a fresh mind and a clean
white sheet of paper.
First of all, as am not a native english speaker, can someone confirm that 'His recognition code SHOULD appear in the
message' is well an assertion and not just a supposition (a 'may be').
If this is the case then 'BEWARE ICE PENGUIN' should appear somewhere in our pain text. BUT ... does those 3 words have
to be each one after other ? I never send recognition code in a secret message (I never took part in any war, thanks god), but
should it be possible that our plain text should be something like for example :
"BEWARE THE DOGS AND THE WEASELS THEY BITE I SEE ICE ALL AROUND ME" ... In this sentence you find the 3
words 'Beware' 'ice' and 'weasels', but not alltogether .... Is this a real 'secret message' situation ??
I'm going to think about that now.
Maybe we should just brute force it will all possible matrix and check for the words 'beware', 'ice', 'weasels', 'stop', 'end', and
even those penguin ones. hhhhmmm 25! = .. a lot of 0's :(
Any advices on this 'new road' ?
Thanks,
Laurent
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Re: in seek of a new road ...
Wednesday, 10-Nov-1999 11:37:05
128.113.195.133 writes:
Laurent,
Wouldn't really think that beware ice weasels would be separated... that is his "recognition code".
However, I think, too, that we are missing something and that a 'new road' is needed...
Csativa
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Re: Re: in seek of a new road ...
Wednesday, 10-Nov-1999 11:49:41
62.156.30.29 writes:
thought of brute-forcing, too. (not a nice idea)
Got this URL :
http://www.albany.net/~cybernet/playfair.htm
Never heard of Zipf's Law, but seems to be the table 'how often is a letter used'.
Found some URL's (Zipf is dead already), but he has made a table only for frequency of *words*, not letters. I don't think, that
our code is plain english (with lots of 'the' and so on), so we should better know about frequency of letters in english. I know
this for my language, but not for english. Think 'e' is the winner.
Your thought about different places for the 3 words : don't think so. This is a endless road ..
Damn, they said 'easy' - there *must* be something else we missed.
the seeker
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Re: Re: Re: in seek of a new road ...
Wednesday, 10-Nov-1999 12:18:16
129.234.4.10 writes:
I thought about brute forcing too. I did frequency analysis of letters and also of digraphs, but the message is quite short so
frequency analysis of digraphs is somewhat limited.
However, frequency of single letters also gives hints as they will appear in same row/col as letters which are the usual high
frequency letters e.g. 'e'.
G
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Zipfs law (off topic)
Wednesday, 10-Nov-1999 12:25:55
195.96.98.222 writes:
http://linkage.rockefeller.edu/wli/zipf/
Is a nice reference page for that.
dose
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another point of view
Wednesday, 10-Nov-1999 12:22:23
193.158.164.88 writes:
They did NOT say, that 'beware ... ' will be written as it is. He could also use this sentence backwards ( ... eraweb).
And what's still in my mind til this morning : WHY can't the controllers (who got all the keys) read the message ? Why
should he use another word ? I played a little bit with 'manchester', even if you miss a letter (in hurry, you can decipher it).
Maybe the first line is NOT the first ?
The Seeker
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Re: another point of view
Wednesday, 10-Nov-1999 12:31:09
128.113.176.138 writes:
I think we are reading too much into this problem. Remember it is the first of three, so in the longrun it shouldn't be too
complex. Therefore I believe that BEWAREICEWEASELS will appear as I have written it, not backwards or seperated. Like
everyone else, I cannot think of another approach to this problem and I agree that we must be missing something
fundamental.
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then back to the old road ?
Wednesday, 10-Nov-1999 12:41:25
195.238.22.14 writes:
Well, if everybody agree the previous road must be the right one, then we should keep going on it.
I posted below somewhere the eleven possible solution where BEWAREICEWEASELS can -logically- appear. For those
eleven position, I used rules i think everybody agree.
So maybe, I just can't build grid correctly.
Did someone else tried to build grids for those 11 positions ? If not, maybe someone could try.
Seeker, I have tried 'BEWAREICEWEASELS' in reverse order. Nothing :(
For your others thought (lines inversion), I have no clue. It could be possible ... But I doubt it ... It should be easy.
I have been working with frequencies a bit too and all i can guess for now is that 'probably' ER-RE become OL-LO (LO-OL).
But working with frequencies seems very difficult :(
btw ... the 'crack me' say something that can be a clue for that : 'The -frequency- and -format- indicate that it is a most urgent
message' ... Can we take this as a clue ??
I'm lost now ... need to clear up my mind :)
later,
Laurent
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Re: then back to the old road ?
Wednesday, 10-Nov-1999 12:55:55
128.113.176.138 writes:
Here is a tidbit of information:
before some people counted the number of occurrances of pairs such as AR, OL, LD (etc).
We know that in playfair a pair such as AR and a pair such as RA would both yield the same corresponding letters. Therefore
I ran a script to count the occurrances of pairs, regardless of the order they are in. Here's what I found:
ET: 3 LU: 2 HU: 2 AR: 3
DL: 4 BF: 3 DS: 2 EW: 2
CI: 2 FT: 2 LO: 4 LY: 3
DO: 2 AL: 3 FZ: 2 FY: 2
FU: 2 XX: 2
so can we compare this to the frequency of certain letter combinations in the English language? DL and LO occurr the most,
they might be TH and HE ??? I will play with this when I have more time.
Trumpeter
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Re: then back to the old road ?
Wednesday, 10-Nov-1999 13:19:11
193.158.164.181 writes:
Laurent,
'should' is still un-checked ! At the moment, I only believe of 'stop' and 'end'.
the seeker
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frequencies
Wednesday, 10-Nov-1999 16:09:59
62.156.30.89 writes:
http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~damm/Lehre/oldKrypt/statistik.html
frequency of letters :
__________________________
| a | 6,4 || n | 5,6 |
| b | 1,4 || o | 5,6 |
| c | 2,7 || p | 1,7 |
| d | 3,5 || q | 0,4 |
| e | 10,0 || r | 4,9 |
| f | 2,0 || s | 5,6 |
| g | 1,4 || t | 7,1 |
| h | 4,2 || u | 3,1 |
| i | 6,3 || v | 1,0 |
| j | 0,3 || w | 1,8 |
| k | 0,6 || x | 0,3 |
| l | 3,5 || y | 1,8 |
| m | 2,0 || z | 0,2 |
__________________________
most often bigrams :
_____________
| th | 3,15 |
| he | 2,51 |
| an | 1,72 |
| in | 1,69 |
| er | 1,54 |
| re | 1,48 |
| on | 1,45 |
| es | 1,45 |
| ti | 1,28 |
| at | 1,24 |
| st | 1,21 |
| en | 1,20 |
| or | 1,18 |
| nd | 1,13 |
| to | 1,11 |
| nt | 1,10 |
| ed | 1,07 |
| is | 1,06 |
| ar | 1,01 |
_____________
the 10 most popular english words :
the of and to a in that it is I
the seeker
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problem with 'frequencies'
Wednesday, 10-Nov-1999 16:39:57
128.113.195.133 writes:
There are some slight problems with the frequencies list: first of all, since we are treating with an encoded war message,
most articles and obvious verbs will be deleted (that is 'enemies near' rather than 'the enemies are near'). Remember the
shorter the plaintext the harder they are to decrypt.
This will change both the frequencies of words, and duets and letters... however, we can safely say that the most frequent
letter is going to be 'e' just for the ammount of times it appears in the example sentences.
Another note: take into account that this is 1)a tv program promotion thing, 2)a contest that even though designed by a great
cypher is _managed_ by non great cypher's (i.e. the pbs PR ppl) and 3)the first (easy) cypher .... they are NOT giving us fake
clues, I am very certain about it.
I'll take some time to relax, hopefully I'll clear my head enough to get some new ideas... and some sleep someday (there are
some advantages to not sleeping too much... but too many disadvantages :)
Csativa
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Re: problem with 'frequencies'
Wednesday, 10-Nov-1999 16:59:59
193.158.164.77 writes:
1. correct with "the" and so on, I posted this before, too. Agree with you, that in such a "war-message" every unimportant
things (like "the" or "a") are left out to reduce bandwith. Posted this list just for general information.
2. "e" = most common. I agree.
I don't think, that any "list" will bring us any further.
3. the tv-promo-thing. *Should* be correct. My first thought when seeing this campaign was, that task one (the easy one)
could be solved rather quick. Hmm...
Still think that we have missed something. Gonna concentrate at 'keyword' - tomorrow
regards
The Seeker
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Re: hi ya all; good afternoon from California
Wednesday, 10-Nov-1999 17:03:29
216.224.152.126 writes:
okay everything I read says that the letter 'e' is used most frequently in
the english language...
okay; if i follow -Tx hes sayin that the higher freqency of l and f means
it is Placed somewhere in the matrix that is used many times...this would not
then nessecarily mean that either f or l = e then; but rather the placement?
NOT SURE..
assuming the greatest nymber L=e then:
beware ice weasels
VY TE SY ED LU TE RV LF NV UH DW AR DL CF FB SD EW NP XK IC
............e........e...............e.....................
FT RE OL KA LZ YL SL TO BK EV LY AR MK RB OD NA LD YP LA ET
.......e....e......e..........e.................e.....e....
OL QA DF HS FZ WN AI DS MU RU OL HR YL LO TW FY LD IC VL US
.e.............................e.....e.e........e......e...
VS SF ZY LU NF FX LK TG BC DO BF AL EW RP FY WL HU LD AR LI
.........e........e...............e...........e....e.....e.
TF LA BF FZ CY FU UF BG XX XX
...e...................
how would i reconstruct these letters into the matrix?
AL LA DL LD LF LI LK OL LO SL LU VL LY WL YL LZ
xxxxx
xxxxx
xxxxx
xxxxx
xxxxx
..so there being no XL would mean that the keyword ends uneven?
and the x is in the last colum somewhere?
making either a 4-9-14-19-24 letter keyword?
or using f the seconf most occuring letter
beware ice weasels
using f
VY TE SY ED LU TE RV LF NV UH DW AR DL CF FB SD EW NP XK IC
......................e.................e.e................
FT RE OL KA LZ YL SL TO BK EV LY AR MK RB OD NA LD YP LA ET
e..........................................................
OL QA DF HS FZ WN AI DS MU RU OL HR YL LO TW FY LD IC VL US
.......e....e................................e.............
VS SF ZY LU NF FX LK TG BC DO BF AL EW RP FY WL HU LD AR LI
....e........e.e...............e..........e................
TF LA BF FZ CY FU UF BG XX XX
.e.....e.e.....e.. e.........
fb fc fd fl nf sf ft fu fx fy fz
xxxxx
xxxxx
xxxxx
xxxxx
xxxxx
even though Im sure this isn't even a horseshoe (close) can someone explain how I would use these letters to backtrack build
this matrix as an example...?
If u have time...I just can't wrap my brain in it; thanks
jeff
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Toooo much for this night :
Wednesday, 10-Nov-1999 17:08:33
193.158.164.77 writes:
gonna check this out after some - rather necessary - cap of sleep. Please be patient.
regards
the seeker
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Re: Re:WHOOPS above message did not format correctly try again here with pre tag
Wednesday, 10-Nov-1999 17:10:13
216.224.152.126 writes:
okay everything I read says that the letter 'e' is used most frequently in
the english language...
okay; if i follow -Tx hes sayin that the higher freqency of l and f means
it is Placed somewhere in the matrix that is used many times...this would not
then nessecarily mean that either f or l = e then; but rather the placement?
NOT SURE..
assuming the greatest nymber L=e then:
beware ice weasels
VY TE SY ED LU TE RV LF NV UH DW AR DL CF FB SD EW NP XK IC
............e........e...............e.....................
FT RE OL KA LZ YL SL TO BK EV LY AR MK RB OD NA LD YP LA ET
.......e....e......e..........e.................e.....e....
OL QA DF HS FZ WN AI DS MU RU OL HR YL LO TW FY LD IC VL US
.e.............................e.....e.e........e......e...
VS SF ZY LU NF FX LK TG BC DO BF AL EW RP FY WL HU LD AR LI
.........e........e...............e...........e....e.....e.
TF LA BF FZ CY FU UF BG XX XX
...e...................
how would i reconstruct these letters into the matrix?
AL LA DL LD LF LI LK OL LO SL LU VL LY WL YL LZ
xxxxx
xxxxx
xxxxx
xxxxx
xxxxx
..so there being no XL would mean that the keyword ends uneven?
and the x is in the last colum somewhere?
making either a 4-9-14-19-24 letter keyword?
or using f the seconf most occuring letter
beware ice weasels
using f
VY TE SY ED LU TE RV LF NV UH DW AR DL CF FB SD EW NP XK IC
......................e.................e.e................
FT RE OL KA LZ YL SL TO BK EV LY AR MK RB OD NA LD YP LA ET
e..........................................................
OL QA DF HS FZ WN AI DS MU RU OL HR YL LO TW FY LD IC VL US
.......e....e................................e.............
VS SF ZY LU NF FX LK TG BC DO BF AL EW RP FY WL HU LD AR LI
....e........e.e...............e..........e................
TF LA BF FZ CY FU UF BG XX XX
.e.....e.e.....e.. e.........
fb fc fd fl nf sf ft fu fx fy fz
xxxxx
xxxxx
xxxxx
xxxxx
xxxxx
even though Im sure this isn't even a horseshoe (close) can someone explain how I would use these letters to backtrack
build this matrix as an example...?
If u have time...I just can't wrap my brain in it; thanks
jeff
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