Cryptography application

Given below is an excerpt from an English novel by a well known author. It is coded using a cipher which uses a specific character for each letter. Enter answer as a number with digits as d d m m y y y y \overline { ddmmyyyy } where d d / m m / y y y y dd/mm/yyyy is the date of birth of the author.

Click here for the task.

Details and Assumptions:

Assume the code to be composed of lowercase letters only.


The answer is 21091866.

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2 solutions

Here is the cipher and the number of each character appears in the text.

a = 1362 n o 1074
b š 361 o 1064
c ^ 343 p q 262
d 4 828 q > 25
e ž 1920 r m 911
f 8 282 s < 1093
g b 369 t r 1413
h ; 1140 u a 434
i g 1131 v y 151
j 3 12 w z 349
k p 161 x 5 23
l 642 y [ 255
m 389 z u 4

That's great! Thanks for posting it!

Raghav Vaidyanathan - 6 years, 3 months ago

We can use the letter frequency table of English to map the symbols to their letter counterparts. That is, find the percentage occurrence of each symbol, and map them to the letter which has closest percent occurrence in the language. Then some fine tuning will allow us to see that the excerpt is from the novel "The Invisible Man" by H.G Wells who was born on 21 / 09 / 1866 21/09/1866

It was an easy question but you didn't clearly state which symbols apart from lower case letters are used in the text because finding them made the problem unsolvable for me because I couldn't find the frequency of all English characters including space, comma etc in the internet. So for me it was a test of internet surfing skills than solving the question!

Bhaskar Pandey - 2 weeks, 1 day ago

1 pending report

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