Reply To: Challenge 10B
When you’re stuck with a mix of letters and numbers, it often helps to pause and ask what role they’re playing, rather than immediately trying to map them to plaintext. A good sanity check is to look at how the characters are grouped: are they always appearing in fixed-size chunks? Do certain pairs or patterns repeat exactly?
Another helpful question to think about would be what does one unit of ciphertext correspond to in plaintext. Eg: if you were dealing with morse code, then the dots and dashes aren’t individual letters, but groups of them are. So if you tried to map . and – directly to A/B, you’d get nowhere. With mixed symbols, it can help to first decide what one complete unit of ciphertext actually is, before worrying about turning it into letters.