Anyone like to share what method they used to crack the first code?

[Anonymous]

Just wondering what method has everybody used to crack the code. I wish everyone good luck in the competition.

[Anonymous]

I’m afraid I’ll leave you wondering, even if people try and answer.

Talking about challenges is distinctly frowned upon while the challenge is ongoing: that means no clues (unless one of us OKs them), no discussions of things in the challenges, and certainly no discussion of how they were solved.

Please don’t make me get out the [snip]-ers!

[Anonymous]

Did I mention that the Elves can get savage? I seem to think I at least hinted at it in the FAQ. Anyway, we might open up the forum to discuss this Monday(ish) as long as people don’t give too much away. I will let the Elves police it.
Harry

[Anonymous]

Seeing as the answers have been published now, my guess is that we are allowed to discuss how we did it; both parts of challenge 1 are the caesar cipher. {snip}

[Anonymous]

Absolutely you can discuss challenge 1 now that it is completed. No problem.

[Anonymous]

For challenge one, I used a frequency analysis tool along with some guessing to find the Caesar shift amount for each message (assuming that the most common letter in the ciphertext coded to E, the next most common to T etc). After I had found the shift amount from a few letters, I filled in the full “cipherbet” – A to D, B to E etc (as an example). From there it was simple to loop through all of the letters and replace them with a program I made, decoding to get the plaintext message.

[Anonymous]

I like the word “cipherbet”!

[Anonymous]

Thanks water_biscuit, I made it up because it seemed to fit well and to be fair I’m shocked that it’s not an actual word.

[Anonymous]

python was my method

[Author]

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