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Well we’ve always used scripts to solve these ciphers. For the first few challenges it’s a simple copy + paste to get it done, though none of get round to actually doing that until later in the day, so we’re never at the top of the table haha
@Madness
There is little point in automation other than egotism. There is plenty of time to copy and paste and solve to obtain the high score if one can solve it within the first boundary time limit (hours not minuets or seconds). Bare in mind that this is a contest aimed at school pupils, not experts like you.Regulars here all know how good you are, you no longer need to prove that, but please stay with us we need your input and expertise.
I automate cracking the ciphers although I am rewriting my programs this year so they aren’t as capable yet and any monoalphabetic ciphers harder than caesar or affine I crack manually in word so I am always very happy when we get on to vigenere. I also have a parsing system to grab the ciphertext off the website the moment it goes live which has to be rewritten sometimes because the website changes and never works on ciphertext 2 because the affine section on the bottom changes the formatting. In a good circumstance the only manual bit is pasting the ciphertext back into the website
Ouch!
I’m not competing this year, and am trying to move to more of a mentoring role. But no one asks questions. Oh well.
My 2ยข worth is that coding is fun, and if some of you want to compete to see who can do it best, then that is
a kind of learning experience that is worth having.As @Cypher points out, little changes on the site can trip you up. That, and poor internet connections, are the
biggest obstacles IMHO.@Cipher, there is a paper by Jakobsen in Cryptologia in 1995 with a fast way to solve monos by hill-climbing.
He uses digram fitness, but you can do it with trigrams or larger (larger groups work better for shorter texts).
volume 19, issue 3, page 265
http://doi.org/10.1080/0161-119591883944
If you can’t read it because you don’t want to pay for it, the upshot is that he randomly swaps letters of the
key and keeps the new key only if the fitness improves.@Cipher, I have noticed that something has not changed in the last 3 seasons: the ciphertext is between tags
containingclass="challenge__contentand</div. Maybe that helps.
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