Reply To: Challenge 10B
10B…in the spirit of what’s been suggested above, we’re going to write down some of our observations…who knows which of these Harry might let through!
1) We think the ciphertext needs to be split into bigrams and that each bigram represents a card from a standard deck of playing cards (X = 10, A=Ace, CDHS are the suits)
2) There are 3322 “cards” – factors of this number are 1,2,11,22,151,302,1661,3322
3) if we arrange the “cards” into a matrix with 151 Rows and 22 Columns we note that every even numbered column contains only spades or “royal hearts”
4) all 52 cards are present in the ciphertext with varying frequencies. Spades are most common given observation #3
Unfortunately, we’re now a little stuck as to what to do with the cards. We tried to find a way of “playing” each pair of cards against each other and mapping the “winning” card (ordered by face value then a suit tie-breaker) to a letter in the alphabet and then using a hill climb technique to manipulate the mapping but it’s thus far yielded gibberish.
We’ll keep at it!