topic Re: Challenge #177: Ham Hamlet in Weekly Challenges

Challenge #177: Ham Hamlet

AYXAcademy — Tue, 13 Sep 2022 15:05:40 GMT

A solution to last week's challenge can be found here!

This challenge was created for a HackCU hackathon event in which teams were formed and were given 24 consecutive hours and Alteryx Designer to solve the challenge.

In this challenge you must break apart the given [encoded_string] into two character pairs and then build a decoder table, mapping the two-character pairs into ASCII characters to reveal a pig-latin encoded document.

To solve, or not to solve: that is the question.

Re: Challenge #177: Ham Hamlet

patrick_digan — Mon, 19 Aug 2019 19:13:21 GMT

They gave us a=ac and y=qd. I looked at the big nasty string and surmised that ks was a space since it appeared after acqd. Using that I could break it into words. From there I analyzed the most frequent words. The first one was a three letter word, so I guessed that 5c=e 7d=t and 8c=h since the is the most common 3 letter word. Then I saw number 4 and guessed that I=9C. For number #5, this handy site suggested that o=2d since it's the most popular 2 letter word. #6 I guessed that f=6c. Then for #9 I saw that 9c must be i. At this point I then assumed that the capital letters were simply created by capitalizing the second letter (ie 9c=i and 9C=I, ac=a and aC=A). This gave me most of the 26 letters needed to get the full list from the helper macro. I just kept going through the top of the list and trying to find cases where it had to be a certain letter missing.

Final look:

Initial words after figuring out ks=space

Re: Challenge #177: Ham Hamlet

T_Willins — Tue, 20 Aug 2019 00:08:49 GMT

Woo Hoo! Solved it! If I can be second to Patrick, I'm OK (for now) with that.

Workflow is messy, but my path is explained in the second spoiler.

Re: Challenge #177: Ham Hamlet

estherb47 — Tue, 20 Aug 2019 02:32:13 GMT

Doozy of a challenge! Lots of trial and error and best guesses.

First, separated the text into 2 character strings, and summarized to see which were the most popular. "ks" came up behind the givens, so assumed this represents a space. Also, 5c was next, so assumed this represents an "e"

Next, grabbed a list of letter popularity to see if that would work to decode, from this website

Nope. It failed.

Next approach was MUCH more manual.

Like @patrick_digan , decided to break the text up into what seemed like words. Then looked for words that begin with vowels (words that end in "yay"). Used letter popularity to assign vowels to codes, and then surmised that the second letter indicated case (5c=e, 5C=E):

Still not enough letters to test, so had to look at popular words (used the list on this website). Replaced the "known" letters to see if patterns were there. looking for and, of, -ing patterns, and but were enough letters to make the decoder macro work!

Then a join, record id, summarize, and data cleanse finish up the process.

Haven't tackled the extra credit........ yet.....

Re: Challenge #177: Ham Hamlet

kat — Tue, 20 Aug 2019 12:08:18 GMT

Yay to more puzzles! 🙂

I started out by spliting my text into character pairs. I then used the find/replace to append the mapping table. Based on the frequency and the fact that it was always after ay I noticed that ks is a space. I then kept skimming through the data, trying to fill in easy words, also knowing that a word ending in yay must start with a vowel. This is how I found n and d in and. Thereafter I stumpled across anywhere and anyone that gave me a bunch of letters. Next came the giving me t, followed by s, u, i. By that point I'd also realised what makes a capital letter, easily getting me across the 26 character mark.

Re: Challenge #177: Ham Hamlet

ZenonH — Tue, 20 Aug 2019 13:51:05 GMT

Super fun challenge. This workflow killed my computer twice, and one time I hadn't saved anything 😞

Written solve process:

I began by identifying the space character and then splitting up the string. From here I organized my workflow so that i could do an analysis of words and letter groups. Using this website I started to pick out the most common vowels. After finding out about the Capital letters being a freebie I reorganized my cipher table to 52 rows and laid out the given letters.

As I cycled through solved letters and words I began to analyse 10 character words to find the easy letters between.

(after solving It, At, The, Is, and To I had enough to finish)

To get up to 26 solved letters I began filling in the pattern for b-->D, and finishing off 2 letter words

Helpful resources were to and from piglatin translators (could have used my tool but would have been slow)

Note: For some reason I couldn't connect the macro output to a find replace once I had made 26 matches.

Workflow:

Re: Challenge #177: Ham Hamlet

RolandSchubert — Tue, 20 Aug 2019 14:11:26 GMT

Finally solved it, with a lot of trial and error ... it's not a really elegant elegant solution, in positive terms, it's very "interactive" (driven by specific selections or input)

Like @patrick_digan , I started identifying the whitespace character (3rd most character, next to "acqd" or "qdacqd"), and made the guess, that second character indicates upper- or lowercase

Identified the vowels (selected the words ending with "qdacqd", parsed out first character, sorted by count and assigned the deciphered letter by frequency (according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_frequency)

after trying some other approaches (most frequent characters, character pairs, doublette letters) I ended up filtering 2 letter words beginnig with specific vowels (i.e. 10 characters encoded including "qdacqd" at the end) and assigned replacement by word frequency (according to https://www.eslkidstuff.com/wordlists/WordList300.pdf, e.q. most frequent 2 letter word starting with "a" is "at" - most frequent in my list was "ay", so I used the second on the list). This worked fine for "o", "i", "a", the result for for "u" dissented to the result from "i"

filtered words with "e" as a second letter ("be", "he", "me") - I expected these words to start with the encoded "e" and end with "acqd"

Re: Challenge #177: Ham Hamlet

NicholasM — Tue, 20 Aug 2019 14:35:32 GMT

I Eventually got there. Attached is my completed workflow

1) Like most people my analysis started with figuring out that ks indicated a space, this allowed me to parse out individual words.
2) I used this helpful quiz to decide the words I wanted to decode first, starting with the smallest words. This quiz gave me the most commonly used words in Hamlet.
3) From there I used an English to Pig-Latin converter to assist me with how these common words would be spelled in Pig-Latin. I am not fluent.
4) I for sure used a brute-force approach which included tons of trial and error. The tool containers indicate the words I was able to decode in that data stream by placing missing letters with potential words from the quiz listed above.

Re: Challenge #177: Ham Hamlet

Claje — Tue, 20 Aug 2019 20:23:03 GMT

This was a neat one

I probably cheated on the spirit of the challenge, but I think my answer is fun so I went with it, after attempting a similar manual process to others here.

Since we knew that only ASCII characters were in scope, I split out the encoded string into 2 character pairs and generated a list of all printable ASCII characters. Then I used an Append Fields tool to create a combination of all two character pairs/ascii characters, and fed this into the macro. This is very much the "shotgun" approach - while I had ~23,000 incorrect values, since I had at least 26 right, the macro spit out the full cipher key, and I was able to feed this into the rest of the process.

theoretically something similar could be done by limiting these scales based on our known information, with manual review to break the cipher.

Re: Challenge #177: Ham Hamlet

estherb47 — Tue, 20 Aug 2019 20:46:01 GMT

@Claje, cool approach!!!

Re: Challenge #177: Ham Hamlet

ddiesel — Wed, 21 Aug 2019 00:00:41 GMT

Out of every weekly challenge, this was my ABSOLUTE FAVORITE so far!

My solution:

At first I wasn’t sure how to go about tackling this one, but I found this article on cryptography that inspired me to start cracking the code!

https://www3.nd.edu/~busiforc/handouts/cryptography/cryptography%20hints.html

My approach:

“ac” as “a” and “qd” as “y” were given at the start.
From that point I was able to identify the likely space characters “ks” and “qs” by placement and frequency.
Once the spaces were identified, I grouped by word and position with the Multi-Row Formula and Tile tools. The assigned character positions helped me to break apart the actual word from the pig latin suffixes.
Next I filtered by position count to find the shortest words like “y_ay” that were likely “by” or “my”.
At each possible letter guess I checked the frequency of the encoded pairs and used this to start making educated guesses. For example: “B” is more common than “M” as a starting character.
The next thing that stood out clearly to me was word 22 “a_y_____yay” and I guessed that it was “anywhere”. This was mostly a lucky guess, but as I skimmed past it was very clearly “anywhere”
Quickly thereafter, “A_e__eares_ay” stood out to me as SHAKESPEARE, which was a word that I already had in my head because of the Hamlet clue in the pig picture.
I then searched for double characters that were likely “ss”, “ee”, “tt”, etc. and actually “eBook” stood out strangely with the "e" and double “oo”. Breaking this word filled in enough letters that the words started to pop of the screen.
From there it was quite easy to guess the required number of characters to unlock the cypher macro!

Re: Challenge #177: Ham Hamlet

Hannah_Lissaman — Wed, 21 Aug 2019 10:17:12 GMT

My solution - with a bit of a shortcut below the spoiler tag for anyone who doesn't love word puzzles!

I followed a very similar route to the other posters, but found that the quickest route to find 26 characters was to also enter the upper case versions of each character.

If the second character of each encoded pair is upper case, then the corresponding decoded letter is upper case as well. For example, 9C is I and 9c is i.

Re: Challenge #177: Ham Hamlet

pasccout — Wed, 21 Aug 2019 16:26:01 GMT

Wow... that one was very interesting and kept me going and going...

The frequency was the clue... finding out top words on hamlet on the web helped.

Figuring out ending by yay for words starting with a letter helped a lot

The final one to get to 26 is that if the 2nd letter of the encryption was uppercase it meant the same as the lower equivalent but with an uppercase letter!

Then is iterations...

Re: Challenge #177: Ham Hamlet

cplewis90 — Wed, 21 Aug 2019 16:27:49 GMT

Fun challenge! I didn't go as far as translating the pig latin to English but go the message.

I focused on generating the different character values and pushed every combination into the checker macro. That produced a find replace file and made the change into the pig latin phrase very easy. If there was no file I was comparing to and it wouldn't put the information out to be used, I would have had to take some other approach.

Re: Challenge #177: Ham Hamlet

alex — Thu, 22 Aug 2019 01:56:36 GMT

2D2dqc3cacqdah

Definitely showing my age here, I got my inspiration from Gilligan singing Hamlet.

Regex to split to pairs

Investigated frequency

Saw placement of ks as space

Formula to identify words based on space also to identify words starting with Vowels based on yay.

one path with tile and Cross tab to create column for each pair

2nd path with concatenate string

Summarize to group by word string

Started guessing based on "the" being the 2nd highest count of word group. "5c7d8cacqdks" and "I" being the single letter group. From there then "to", "of", "you", "your", "is" ,"with". You get the picture.

Initially went down wrong path trying to match first words to beginning of Hamlet or one the acts in Hamlet.
Before

After

Re: Challenge #177: Ham Hamlet

meekben — Thu, 22 Aug 2019 22:13:56 GMT

Solution similar to others. Once I had solved the letter 'e' in 'ethay' along with the given 'a' and 'y', the word 'anywhere' in the first line jumped out at me.

I noticed that no one had yet attempted the extra credit in their solution. The reason for this is that converting Pig Latin back into English is teeth-grindingly awful. Challenge #174 had you create an English to Pig Latin converter- straightforward as you can locate the first vowel as your marker for the start of the word. But to reverse this you need to know how many letters were moved before adding 'ay' or 'yay'.

My basic approach was to permute the Pig Latin words in different combinations, smash against a list of all words (cabbaged from challenge #75) to find matches, then union the result back together in Record ID order. Of course, this misses all the proper nouns and delightfully antique Elizabethan word constructions. Short words like 'no' are also a problem if they convert into other good English words. I did not even touch the punctuation, leaving that field of battle open to some future masochist.

"Let those who are in favour with their stars" try to improve on this, please!

Re: Challenge #177: Ham Hamlet

meekben — Fri, 23 Aug 2019 14:59:13 GMT

Solution similar to others. Once I had solved the letter 'e' in 'ethay' along with the given 'a' and 'y', the word 'anywhere' in the first line jumped out at me.

"Let those who are in favour with their stars" try to improve on this, please!

Re: Challenge #177: Ham Hamlet

nivi_s — Sun, 25 Aug 2019 22:57:55 GMT

A super fun challenge! Like others I've seen on here, I identified that the 'ks' characters are spaces, so after converting that, I used space as a delimiter to list the words out in rows and summarized the count. I then identified some of the letters and used a Find-Replace to update the list of words as I added characters until I reached 26 (because it was case sensitive, it was easy to fill out the 26 required characters once we see that 9c is i and 9C is I.)

Re: Challenge #177: Ham Hamlet

pjdit — Mon, 26 Aug 2019 17:21:04 GMT

My solution.. fun challenge!

Re: Challenge #177: Ham Hamlet

LifebloomX — Tue, 27 Aug 2019 17:10:07 GMT