Code-breaking
Let's work with Caesar ciphers. This is just a shift of lower-case characters by a certain number of positions (say, n positions), and the same shift of n positions for the upper-case characters as well. And, of course, no shift for non-letters. So if we knew what the value of n was, we could decrypt a message that was encrypted using this technique. Well, what if we have an encrypted message but we don't know what n is? How can we decrypt such a message? One way to do that is to make a guess for n and try decrypting the message with that n and see if it looks like something that we can read -- does it have English words? I am going to give you a quotation from a famous scientist, that's been encryted using the Caesar encryption technique, but I'm not going to give you the value of n. However, to make the problem harder (this is why I pull down the big bucks), you're not allowed to use your knowledge of English to figure this out. I will, however, give you another clue: the name of one of the NYC's major professional sports teams is one of the words in the actual quotation. So, here is your task ... the encrypted message is:
Zw z yrmv jvve wlikyvi zk zj sp jkreuzex fe kyv jyflcuvij fw Xzrekj BTW, this is what cryptanalysts do. 1. What is the quotation? 2. Who said it? |