Weekly Challenges
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Very fun, interesting, and challenging puzzle this week!
Spoiler
Like many others, I split each pair or encoded "letters" apart and quickly surmised that "ks" must be a space. I used the frequency tool to see how often each encoded pair showed up.
From there, I used that knowledge to split each encoded string into words and calculated frequencies for the words.
Using the frequencies of letters, frequencies of words, and examining the nature of the letters within the broader structure of the text, I also surmised that "jh" must be a period.
Then, I looked at common, shorter words, which got me "t = 7d" and "h = 8c" and "e = 5c." It took a bit longer for me to determine that the case of the second letter in the encoded string matches with the case of the true letter. Thus, "T = 7D" and so on.
The final hint I stumbled across was the word "anywhere" which gave me "w" and "r" (upper and lower case), which put me over 26 correct and unlocked the decypher table.
It's not an elegant solution, but experience doing cryptoquote puzzles paid off in spades here.
From there, I used that knowledge to split each encoded string into words and calculated frequencies for the words.
Using the frequencies of letters, frequencies of words, and examining the nature of the letters within the broader structure of the text, I also surmised that "jh" must be a period.
Then, I looked at common, shorter words, which got me "t = 7d" and "h = 8c" and "e = 5c." It took a bit longer for me to determine that the case of the second letter in the encoded string matches with the case of the true letter. Thus, "T = 7D" and so on.
The final hint I stumbled across was the word "anywhere" which gave me "w" and "r" (upper and lower case), which put me over 26 correct and unlocked the decypher table.
It's not an elegant solution, but experience doing cryptoquote puzzles paid off in spades here.
Challenge 177 is done!
Spoiler
I took a similar approach to others and split into character pairs to summarise, noting that ks was likely a space. Split to rows on "ks" to get each word separately and went down the list of most common English words (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_common_words_in_English converted them into Pig Latin) and used regex to find the likely candidate words according to how frequent they were!
Studies that estimate and rank the most common words in English examine texts written in English. Perhaps the most comprehensive such analysis is one that was conducted against the Oxford English Corpus (OEC), a massive text corpus that is written in the English language. In total, the texts in ...
This challenge was... ifficultday. BUT I FIGURED OUT THE PATTERN, HAM HAMLET. So take that.
Spoiler
The key to this one for me was finding the most likely space character first, and then looking for patterns in the smaller 2 & 3 letter words, via trial & error method, to get to enough letters that I could spot the pattern in the cypher. Lots of wrong turns and false positives, but was eventually able to get there! Fun challenge in the end, even if I did periodically yell at it (in both English and pig latin, naturally).
Eerschay!
NJ
Whew. That one was tough, but fun.
Spoiler
My method wasn't that different from others. Figured out with the pig latin that ks had to be a space, then looked for frequency of words and letters, solved for 'the' and 'and,' among others. After about 10 or 11 letters I got the capitalization clue and my speed picked up. It ran pretty slow, so it wasn't a speedy process. After completion, I went to a pig latin translator online and figured out, it was the complete works of Shakespeare, which could explain the size. Getting the Find/Replace to play nice with the output from the macro was a bit challenging and for some reason, when I struggled to get caching to work right on this workflow. I took some screen shots of the iterations and process. Didn't package the workflow due to the file size.
