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September 30, 2005

HINT

Stuck on the first Challenge? Here are some hints to help.

1. If you look at "Challenge 0" which introduced the story you will see that the Captain suggests to me that we should use a particular type of cipher. Look it up on the web if you don't know what it is. That makes it a lot easier to tackle part A.

2. Cryptographers often look for a "crib", i.e., a part of the message whose content you can guess. In the case of part A you will see that its layout is very similar to the layout of Challenge 0 part A, and that might help you to figure out what it says. Given that and the knowledge of the type of cipher used you should be able to crack part A easily.

3. Part B is tougher, since we don't have a crib, but you could try the easy ciphers first. There are two ways to tackle it. One is to try all teh cihers you can think of one at a time and see if any give a message which makes sense. A cleverer way to tackle it is to figure out which letter occurs most often in the text, since this is likely to stand for the letter e. Once you know that you can use the shape of words (single letter words are likely to be a, three letter words ending in e are probably the and so on) to help break the code. Good luck,

Posted by Harry at September 30, 2005 01:59 PM