Several participants have their own programs to insert spaces into an unbroken string of deciphered text. Splitting into bona fide words is simple enough, but accommodating specialist names and abbreviations together with contextualizing the result is disproportionately hungry on processing power and requires constant dictionary updates and reference to extreme data such as the Google Web Trillion Word Corpus. (more info: google Peter Norvig)
For example YOUTHINK might be split as YOU THINK, but if the message concerned tattoos, it might be YOUTH INK.
Punctuation would take the challenge to another level. A leisurely perusal of punctuation style guides confirms that “you can’t please all of the people all of the time”! (with apologies to poet John Lydgate). Any solution is likely to be heuristic and can only deal in probabilities rather than guarantee an accuracy.
The National Cipher Challenges do not require spacing or punctuation. However, I do agree that readability is much improved with at least spaces between words.
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