How To Break A Secret Code
| Games : Codes And Ciphers Perhaps not something that most of us will need to do except for fun, but particularly in the last few centuries, codes were crucial to secret communications between people. So how do you go about breaking a secret code? Well, the majority of codes used by everyday people are a simple substitution code, where one letter is substituted for another letter. Thus A could represent S, T could represent B and so on. This is known as a monosubstitution cipher - technically being a cipher as it works on the level of each letter; strictly a code refers to the level of words. Thus if the word 'food' was represented by '@' then that is a code, not a cipher. The best way to crack a substitution cipher is through frequency analysis. That is, you count up how many times each letter in the cipher appears, and then compare to the average distribution of letters in a language. If the piece of text is of a decent length, you should find that it conforms reasonably well to the standard distribution at least for the major letters. Put these in place in the different combinations of 'e', 't', and 'a' and you should be able to take it from there. Also remember that single letters if the code is spaced out instantly give you either the 'a' or the 'i' as they are the only two letter words. You can also look for pattern combination of words - for instance 'h' often comes straight after 't'. Regularly occurring two and three letter words are often 'and', 'in', 'on', 'the'. In fact if you have a two letter word, then you know that it is highly likely at least one of those letters represents a vowel.
 Questions about puzzles and ciphers:
|
|
Tweet this!
