Re: conlang names and Mensa
| From: | Simon Clarkstone <simon.clarkstone@...> |
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| Date: | Sunday, January 23, 2005, 17:21 |
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On Fri, 10 Dec 2004 22:55:43 -0500, Ph. D. <phild@...> wrote:
> Okay, here's my story, FWIW:
>
> When I was twelve, I created my own micronation. My playmates
> thought I was crazy; what a dumb thing to do. At that age, boys
> often are interested in ciphers and secret writing. (Do many girls
> do that? I don't remember any doing so.) Some of my classmates
> and I were writing secret messages by using a cipher where
> there is a secret number (in our case 12401). One writes that
> number repeatedly over the message, then advances each letter
> that many in the alphabet.
This was first invented by Vigenère, and was considered to be
uncrackable until Charles Babbage found an attack based around the
factors of the distance between repeated strings of letters. The only
difference was that the original cipher used letters not numbers, with
a "Vigenère square" to "add" them. (12401 ==> ABDZA) For more
details use Google.
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=Vigenere+square
--
Simon Richard Clarkstone: s.r.cl*rkst*n*@durham.ac.uk/s*m*n.cl*rkst*n*@
hotmail.com ### "I have a spelling chequer / it came with my PC /
it plainly marks for my revue / Mistake's I cannot sea" ...
by: John Brophy (at: http://www.cfwf.ca/farmj/fjjun96/)