Official help for 8b

[Anonymous]

@Cristina sorry for not replying, yes those numbers look correct.

[Anonymous]

Thanks Joan, I think I’m reversing wrong
Does anyone here have any tips for programming it on excel or word?

[Anonymous]

@cristina Remember that the matrix that you have is the ENCRYPTION matrix. To decrypt, you will need the inverse matrix of the encryption matrix.

[Anonymous]

That feeling when today is the last deadline and you have still got no idea on how to solve this…

[Anonymous]

I don’t get this!!!!!!

[Anonymous]

Please help someone I need to complete it now

[Anonymous]

@Lineage Noir thanks so much, I forgot, but what do you mean inverse matrix?
Thanks

[Anonymous]

Wait so, you reverse each word, then you do Hill Cipher with matrices I posted before but reversed?
If yes, it doesn’t seem to work.

[Anonymous]

I’ve done everything above, reversed each word’s lettering and tried decoding it with a Hill cipher with inversed matrices. However, I get a load of rubbish back with the occasional word in it. Any clues as to what I’m doing wrong?

[Anonymous]

Text Mechanic is a very useful tool for what you suggest, and other things.

[Anonymous]

@cristina The encryption is done by multiplying the encoding or key matrix by series of characters (or the numbers 0-25 representing them) Modulo 26.

Intuitively we should be able to decrypt the ciphertext dividing by the key matrix. However, matrix division is not possible, so we use an inverse matrix.

With numbers consider multiplying a number by its reciprocal 2 x ½ =1. With a matrix, when we multiply by its inverse, we get the identity matrix I. (Think of this as the matrix equivalent of 1. It is a square matrix full of zeros except the top left to bottom right diagonal which are all 1s).

Matrices in mathematics are usually on the curriculum of “A” level maths and Further Pure maths, so don’t beat yourself up if you haven’t got to grip with them (yet), congratulate yourself on the progress that you have made and maybe try one of the non-matrix approaches.

Good luck. Tempus fugit!

[Anonymous]

Cristina I don’t know if your having trouble with reversing of the words, or with the hill cipheriness.
For the reversing, I would suggest having each word on a seperate line in excel (replacing spaces with paragraph marks in word should do this)
The I would use the mid function, but instead of going 1, 2, 3, 4, go 15, 14, 13, 12… (you’ll get a few #VALUE! cells when pasted back into word, but a quick replace should get rid of these)

I would then create a new spreadsheet for the hill cipher solving.
Use MID and VLOOKUP to write the cipher out in numbers (A=0, Z=25), 12 to a row

Then you’ll want to do the cipher text number – previous plaintext number. (sorry if thats not clear it’s weird to explain)
Finally use MOD(cell, 26) to convert your deciphered numbers to numbers between 0-25.

Use VLOOKUP to convert back to A-Z.

Hopefully I didn’t confuse you even more :/

[Anonymous]

Thanks so much guys, got higher than before but not 100.

[Author]

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