Day eighteen: (incomplete) Subsititution Cypher Solver
Today I re-started work on a program to solve substitution cyphers. The substitution cypher is where you take every character in your message and replace it with a different character- they sell little puzzle books full of these to try and crack by hand. My (most likely naive) approach for doing this is to count the frequency of each letter in the message. Starting with a list of the letters that occur most frequently in the English language, I will then use a bunch of different substitution combinations to decrypt the message and compare against a dictionary to calculate which combination works best. It would be ugly to search all combinations because there are so many, so I will start off by masking out all of the letters I haven’t found yet. The code doesn’t get far, but demonstrates how to load the files in.
Last 5 posts by cibomahto
- Day Twenty-Nine: Photos, Thanks! - March 1st, 2008
- Day Twenty-Eight: Photo Wall - February 28th, 2008
- Day Twenty-Seven: Remote Trigger for Powershot S3 - February 28th, 2008
- Day Twenty-Six: Automatic Marshmallow Gun - February 27th, 2008
- Day Twenty-Five: Automatic Marshmallow Gun - February 26th, 2008