For the Christmas Quiz 2011, you must adopt the role of “Enigma” codebreakers. You will be spared the task of reading the morse - those fine ladies at Station X, Bletchley Park, have done it for you and provided you with the number blocks.
And here they are, each string carrying the name of a UK SOTA summit. But can you crack the code and work out which they are? Just like the WW2 days, you will not be told how to unlock the code, you must work that for yourself by analysing the number blocks received, just like Manchester’s own Alan Turing did originally.
50623 - 598253
1419 - 57582547
1271209 - 10370
34410 - 317955
1419 - 4818730
14839 - 4443145
53363
32338 - 559171079 - 598253
4097417 - 598253
14839 - 1707491687
34410 - 598253
784289 - 155636
1271209 - 85769219
6601 - 598253
1272155 - 97 - 361974
97 - 768638
25069 - 97 - 1118
32734771091
49102010878 - 104654
784289 - 97 - 768638
Please use this thread to reply to with your solutions, or to discuss the problems and strategies to solve them.
Unfortunately I have no time to look at this now (I will be travelling) but my first thoughts are:
It’s not really Enigma (if it is can I ask the Polish for help? ;o) )
Normally it would be groups of five that come from the telegraphers; I presume the spacings will give the lengths of the words?
My first thought would be simple substitution but…
There are only 10 characters so sometimes two characters would have to represent one letter. The different character lengths would make this slightly more difficult to crack than usual.
Of course it could be something more devious with the numbers representing some mathematical function acting on the letters of each word,
Yes, it is not the Enigma code itself - but the similarity is that the messages are sent as digit groups and need to be deciphered to get the words.
The names of the summits encrypted use most of the 26 letter alphabet, so those hoping for a selection that can be made from a subset of 10 letters will be disappointed.
There are some hints of people starting to be on the right lines in this thread, but nothing convincing yet!
BTW, Jimmy M3EYP has not been party to any part of this morning’s enciphering, and I have destroyed all the notes I made in doing so. Therefore, please do not “smell a rat” if he decides to join in the challenge at some point!
In reply to 2E0CVU:
Mine hurts, too! we have 444 in No6 and 111 in No17 which indicates against simple substitution unless each time a letter appears or after so many characters the code changes - evil thought! Anyway, there is nothing to say that there are only 26 letters, there might be more numbers to cover things like dd, ff and ll in Welsh, ch, gh, dh, bh etc in Gaelic. I need a large malt…
I can now confirm that Helen M0YHB has cracked the code, and has produced the correct answer for number 17. I assume that when she has more time she will easily produce the answers for the other nineteen codes.
But she hasn’t spoiled it for anyone, so there’s nothing to stop the rest of SOTAland from continuing to apply the brain cells and solving these encrypted summits.
Indeed. There wouldn’t be a lot of point in using one-time pads to make the code unbreakable for a Christmas quiz. Then again, if I was in a particularly bad mood…
