Cryptology

[Elgin Clock]

Can you at least get a confirmation that it is:

A) Most importantly, Appropriate for these forums if someone does solve it
B)Not as important but would be nice to know if it was an actual statement, or sentence, or phrase and not just a bunch of random words.

[elrabin]

I do not think this is a direct-substituion cipher. Reason: There are many 3-letter words and they do not seem to fit in together. "q" appears as the second letter in 3 of those words. I cannot think of any 3 (distinct) three-letter words that share the same middle letter. Additionally, q appears only once in the rest of the cipher.

This leads me to believe that this code was generated using some other method. I think this falls under the Vigenere Cipher (Polyalphabetic cipher), where a keyword is used to shift the letters.

[Katy]

If u is a vowel it is probably not u, i, y, or a. You don't find many doubles of these in the English language. This leaves u to be o or e. Bemis or Ein are probably right.

Either s or r is probably a vowel
If s a vowel r is probably not
If r is a vowel s is probably not

Either w or n is a probably a vowel
If w is a vowel n is probably not
If n is a vowel w is probably not.

Posted by DarkJedi613
u is a vowel.
w is probably a vowel.
q is probably a vowel

I am going to say I think it more likely that w is not a vowel. Your are unlikely to get a double vowel then another vowel in a word like in "kgcuuwf." This makes it very likely that n is a vowel.

That part above is almost logic now we are in the area of true guesswork.

P is likely to not be a vowel. Most words ending in a vowel have do not have a second vowel in front of them. Fewer still of these start in the same letter. like in "plowpn."

Something in "zirl" is a vowel. Things would be simpler if that was the r (also seen in "sr") but that is no guarantee.

Large words are divided into syllables. The basic rules for that are divide between two non-vowels or if there is no place where you can do that after a vowel and before a non-vowel. There are not many multi-syllable words with syllables more than 5 letters long. There are also not many single syllable words longer than 7 letters. This makes it very likely that "fzqfgop" is a two-syllable word. If p is not a vowel and q might be a vowel then it is fairly likely that f is not a vowel.

If w is not a vowel then you can say a lot about "oqw" and "owb." Either o is a vowel or o and/or b are vowels. When you look at "plowpn" "buuconac", "bqn" it is more likely that o is a vowel than b. B would force a triple vowel in "buuconac" but o looks like it could work in syllables. Q looks like a vowel from other words.

We should have 6 things that fit vowel rules: a e i o u and then y is the "could be" vowel that only matters when we find it at the end of the word.

u is a vowel
s or r is probably a vowel
n is probably a vowel
q is probably a vowel
o is probably a vowel

r and n could be y but they also appear in the middle of words so that isn't likely. Those above are probably the five vowels. Also one of them appears in each word if you use r instead of s. This makes the final vowels u, r, n, q, and o.

Originally Posted by elrabin

I do not think this is a direct-substituion cipher. Reason: There are many 3-letter words and they do not seem to fit in together. "q" appears as the second letter in 3 of those words. I cannot think of any 3 (distinct) three-letter words that share the same middle letter. Additionally, q appears only once in the rest of the cipher.

This leads me to believe that this code was generated using some other method. I think this falls under the Vigenere Cipher (Polyalphabetic cipher), where a keyword is used to shift the letters.

That is what I originally believed it to be as well, but the original post does say that it is a single letter-letter substitution. If it hadn't said that, I would've thought that the coder had just used one of the online enigma machine-like applets to write the sequence.

[Mike]

Are you sure he didn't pound his head on the keyboard and just send you on a wild goose chase?

[evulish]

I did some playing around with this and made something to pattern-match against /usr/share/dict/words, and there are very very few words that some of those scrambled words can make and the words they do make don't fit very well into the rest of it. Is there a possibility that the words are reversed? And ranking by popularity in the crypt, the order of letters is: W(13%) U(10%) N(8%) O L(6%) F G Q B(5%) C P R Z A(1%) I K S. There aren't enough letters to get that exact so many of the percentages are the same so it's not quite exact. If you guys need a boost, here are the possibilities I found for 'buuconac'.

base word: 01123452
match: aggerose (01123452)
match: alleyite (01123452)
match: ammelide (01123452)
match: ammeline (01123452)
match: annexive (01123452)
match: annexure (01123452)
match: appetize (01123452)
match: apprizer (01123452)
match: approver (01123452)
match: Arretine (01123452)
match: assemble (01123452)
match: bookmark (01123452)
match: bookrack (01123452)
match: coonskin (01123452)
match: deerhair (01123452)
match: Errantia (01123452)
match: Essenize (01123452)
match: foothalt (01123452)
match: footrest (01123452)
match: irrelate (01123452)
match: keelhaul (01123452)
match: Obbenite (01123452)
match: occlusal (01123452)
match: ollenite (01123452)
match: Ossetine (01123452)
match: rootfast (01123452)
match: rootwalt (01123452)
match: seedbird (01123452)
match: Ubbenite (01123452)
match: unnestle (01123452)
match: woodbind (01123452)
match: woodgeld (01123452)
match: woodland (01123452)
match: woodshed (01123452)
match: woodyard (01123452)

It seems like there's a good chance U = O according to all those matches. The most common words seem to be using it.

[evulish]

Ok, I'm giving up for the night because I don't feel like mucking around any more! I tried running a bunch of the words through something I wrote both forwards and backwards and both ways came up with a false answer (either some REALLY odd words or no word at all). If you want to see what I've made, check out http://www.mehh.net/phpstuff/compare.full.phps . You're not going to be able to run it on my server because it'd bog it down for hours with just one hit. If you want to play with it, you're going to have to bog down your own system Just something like http://localhost/compare.full.php?0=buuconac&1=kgcuuwf will find words that will fit in both those letter patterns. You can add more (append &2=whatever and so on). Maybe I did something wrong, but I'm pretty sure it's working properly. Unless spaces and punctuation were substituted in this, I'm going to assume this is bogus. My dict is ~100,000 words and I'm pretty confident about my code.. so the fact that it returns nothing for me makes me question the validity of the crypt.

(Couple notes about that PHP, it took almost 20 minutes to compare all the 2 and 3 letter words on my G4 1.25ghz. It'd be faster if you were using PHP5 and uncommented that first function. It'd be a lot faster if you rewrote it in C. It totally killed my p133.)

Oh, and sample output is here: http://www.mehh.net/phpstuff/output.txt (from using: http://localhost/compare.full.php?0=...ul&3=fzq fgop)

[Katy]

Well that makes the list of five vowels incorrect...u, r, n, q, o...sorry about that guys

However it is a fairly sure thing that u is a vowel which narrows the posted list to be

match: deerhair (01123452)
match: foothalt (01123452)
match: footrest (01123452)
match: keelhaul (01123452)
match: rootfast (01123452)
match: rootwalt (01123452)
match: seedbird (01123452)
match: woodbind (01123452)
match: woodgeld (01123452)
match: woodland (01123452)
match: woodshed (01123452)
match: woodyard (01123452)

This would make either "n" or "a" a vowel in buuconac.

[Ein]

Originally Posted by MikeWasHere05

Are you sure he didn't pound his head on the keyboard and just send you on a wild goose chase?

He wrote it out on a piece of notebook paper and there were a number of corrections on the original. He also told me that it was a single substitution. I don't think he's quite that devious, but I'll have another talk with him tomorrow.

I'll double check the appropriateness of the message as well.

Thanks again to those spending time on this!