Cryptology

[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!