ciphers and code breakers
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I'm quite fond of codebreaking puzzles, in particular the classic simple monoalphabetic substitution cipher, so I thought I'd offer up some for people to try. But first, I'm gonna show you how to crack them.
So here's an example ciphertext:
It's a sentence randomly chosen from the well-known story Princess Celestia Hates Tea by Skywriter, enciphered using a randomly-chosen monoalphabetic substitution cipher. That is, every letter in the text has been substituted for another. At this point, even I don't know what the text is. But with a little ingenuity, we can crack the code.
So let's see what we've got here. The double quote at the beginning means that this was the beginning of some dialogue, and there's a couple of interesting-looking hyphenated words. But the best way to start off is to try finding likely candidates for common words. Almost any sentence is bound to contain "the" or "and" at some point. As it happens, in this ciphertext, there's a sequence "YAS", which could be either of those words. Let's try "and".
It's hard to say at this stage, but none of those placements look too weird. It doesn't help us a huge amount, though.
That "YFF" looks pretty interesting now though. If we're correct about "a" being the first letter, then there's only a few possibilities for this word. It's probably "all". So let's try that.
Still not much help, but again, this still looks okay so far. I am intrigued by this "PQWPYQW NE QWDWOCW" sequence, however. "W" seems occur frequently, and also quite often at the ends of words. It's quite likely that this is "e". Let's try that:
That's looking much better now. The "ed" at the end of a word is a very good indication we're on the right track. That last word, which currently looks like "--le-an-e", is also pretty telling, because I'm going to guess that it ends in "ance":
Even though we only got two letters out of that, they made a big difference, because now, "QWDWOCW" looks like it might be "receive", based on the letters we already have and the fact that it precedes the word "a".
From this point on, there should be no problem solving the rest. The sentence obviously begins with "all right":
The last three words are clearly "love and tolerance":
"PQWPYQW" is obviously "prepare" (as in, "prepare to receive"), and note that letters can be encoded as themselves:
"EI" is probably "of":
It seems like they're talking about a "double shot" of "weapons-grade love and tolerance":
And we can guess that the remaining letter is "x" as in "faux".
Solved!
I'm amused that my program randomly chose such an awesome line. :) In Princess Celestia Hates Tea, this was Twilight preparing to blast Princess Celestia with the Elements of Harmony (for a second time).
And that's how you solve them!
So here's an easy one to start off, a sentence from Past Sins. I don't know what it is myself, but it's long enough and has enough likely-looking words that it should be straightfoward to crack. Have fun!
NGBHV’V DAEIV DGEG XHNKMHCMGI CV C YHCEI CMMCKSGI C MECLNLNY IHZZW MFCM QAASGI QLSG MDLQLYFM VXCESQG CNI, DLMF C VLNYQG VDLUM ZAMLAN, OGFGCIGI LM.4512262
NEXUS'S WORDS WERE PUNCTUATED AS A GUARD ATTACKED A TRAINING DUMMY THAT LOOKED LIKE TWILIGHT SPARKLE AND, WITH A SINGLE SWIFT MOTION, BEHEADED IT.
To be honest, I kind of cheated by looking at the characters' names in Past Sins and figuring out the obvious five letter name ending with S at the beginning of the sentence. Oh, well.
Also, if I hadn't, there is no other B in the code, so how would I know the name was Nexus?
4513984
That is an unfortunate danger of generating these unchecked. :) Although for Fimfiction stories I actually think it's okay to use story-specific knowledge if it helps. Well done!