Reply To: Adding Spaces
I suppose a word splitting program offers a mild competitive advantage: if the plaintext of the first part of a challenge contained a hint for the second you might be able to read it more quickly. Otherwise, it’s not practical as a text fitness measure and the scoring system on this website ignores spaces. Perhaps you just want to encourage people to write their own software (a noble goal).
Yes and it is not in the spirit of the rules to use word splitting software or packages from elsewhere. Please write your own! Harry
If anyone is interested in writing this sort of program, I suggest compiling a list of words and their frequencies (I used all the plaintexts from madness’ cipher challenge archive, along with some other sources) and then trying to formulate the word splitting problem as a dynamic programming problem.
Dynamic programming is an unintuitive term for breaking a large problem into recursive subproblems (in this case, substrings of the input string) and then saving the result of solving the subproblem (here, where to put spaces in each substring) so it is only computed once. Dynamic programming can be difficult to get your head around but when you think of it as recursion it leads to very fast and quite simple & neat algorithms.