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@BobD
Thank you for mentioning that! I also struggled with it getting stuck at the local maxima (‘wrong hill’) in the past and wrote up an annealing algorithm for later ciphers, and like you said, it’s very useful for substitution ciphers like the playfair. I found that the Wikipedia page has a lot of information, but in terms of implementing Cowan’s, ‘Breaking Short Playfair Ciphers with the Simulated Annealing Algorithm’ might be a useful read for anyone interested in simulated annealing!