Reply To: The official Challenge 10 tips and hints thread
I say I’m determined to solve 10B (couldn’t do it last year), but my team has given up, and I refuse to, even if it means ignoring homework. I clearly have better priorities!
In case we don’t figure it out by the deadline, are you going to post how 10B was solved? I thought I had broken up the text and put it into an excel spreadsheet in the blocks, only to realise I was still in bed and dreaming about it. I then spent the following hour (still in bed), searching whether it was possible to transfer the actions we do in dreams to reality…cipher challenge is clearly driving me insane…
[It is better to use something like python for this, but you can do this if you have a text editor. I use BBEdit on the Mac to process text. If I wanted blocks of 130 letters formatted in five columns I would use a grep pattern to replace each block of five letters with the same five letters separated by tabs and ending with a carriage return by searching for (.)(.)(.)(.)(.) and replacing with \1\t\2\t\3\t\4\t\5\r
Then copy each bunch of twenty six 5-character lines and paste into a spreadsheet. The tabs should ensure characters are pasted into separate cells and the carriage returns enforce row breaks. Hope this helps, Harry]