Is there a pattern to the scrambled text?


I hope not...

There is. ;)

Iosai:

There is. ;)

I think I hate you. :(

I'll give a prize* to the first person to crack it. ;)

(may or may not be anything useful.)

Hmm. I've found a few interesting patterns, actually.

For instance, it seems to be encoded line-by-line, and not as a whole chunk. This means that identical lines in the plain text will always be identical in the ciphered text.

Also, it would seem lines are not compressed in length; if a line is 72 characters long in the plain text, it will be 72 characters long in the ciphered text. HOWEVER, some of those characters could either be invisible (control characters, even?) or line breaks themselves, meaning lines may appear fragmented.

In addition, if two lines start with the same text, the ciphered lines will also start with the same text. However, the length of the identical text might not be the same.

There are, in some instances, long repetitions. These do not seem to count towards the line length.

Interesting tidbit 1: A line consisting of two characters will apparently appear as two identical characters in the ciphered text.

Interesting tidbit 2: ### is enciphered to aza.

Just had a thought. Iosai, is the cipher reversible? I.e. if I take what I get when I READ LETTER, can I apply an algorithm to it and get the plain text? I will assume that the letter is stored in plain text, and what we get when we READ it without the proper key it is enciphered.

Theoretically, it is reversible.

Hrm. Then tidbit #1 makes no sense :( Might be a special case when a number is followed by a period, I suppose (which are the only examples I've got in my letter of two-character lines).

I hope "theoretically" doesn't mean "would take longer than the half-life of the present universe on a non-quantum Turing machine".

There's a difference between "figure out the pattern" and "reverse-engineer a cipher without knowing the key".

EDIT: An example (that doesn't apply to this cipher in the least, as far as I can tell): If I tell you that first, my cipher assigns a number based on a letter (1 for A, 2 for B etc) and then adds the number similarly assigned for the key, then that's the pattern. However, trying to decipher that without knowing the multiple-letter key would, indeed, be very processor-intensive.

Doing the following text

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
bcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyza
cdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzab
defghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabc
efghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcd
fghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcde
ghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdef
hijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefg
ijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefgh
jklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghi
klmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghij
lmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijk
mnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijkl
nopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklm
opqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmn
pqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmno
qrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmnop
rstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmnopq
stuvwxyzabcdefghijklmnopqr
tuvwxyzabcdefghijklmnopqrs
uvwxyzabcdefghijklmnopqrst
vwxyzabcdefghijklmnopqrstu
wxyzabcdefghijklmnopqrstuv
xyzabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvw
yzabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwx
zabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxy

using the "a" as the cipher produces some interesting results.

Too bad I can't pick and choose my texts, or I would've done something similar.

Sometimes, if you click on the letters, they move. I am impressed.

That is more likely to be client-related than cipher-related. My letters certainly don't move around.

casilu:
If you didn't have anything interesting, why would you bother to encipher it...

The answer to this is in the background (as in VIEW BACKGROUND) of the character in question.

Lendren:

The answer to this is in the background (as in VIEW BACKGROUND) of the character in question.

Wait, you actually wrote one?

Cryptographically speaking, any cipher is 100 times easier to decode if you can encipher arbitrary text with it and look at the results -- which you can never do in any real decryption effort -- so it's arguable that anyone who uses their own ability to encipher to figure out the code is cheating.

casilu:
Wait, you actually wrote one?

Two so far. The one in question has been periodically pointed out on the forum as a great example of how to use one.

Lendren:

Two so far. The one in question has been periodically pointed out on the forum as a great example of how to use one.

I actually didn't think they were that used here. I remember having to write one for guild advancement on Achaea...


And thank you for confirming to me who you are.

(It won't change anything.)