In order to find her easter egg, my daughter first had to solve a +1 transposition cryptogram with appended translation table. It gave her the location of a note with a +9 cryptogram where she was given the offset but had to write her own translation table. This led to a +9 cryptogram that resolved into Mandarin written with pinyin. She needed little help. Though since there were no tone indicators in the encrypted pinyin, she at first searched beneath a window (chuÄng) instead of under a bed (chuáng).
- Log in to post comments
More like this
Where encryption starts getting really interesting, in my opinion, is
block ciphers. Block ciphers are a general category of ciphers that
are sort of a combination of substitution and transposition ciphers, and
sort of something entirely different. They're really fascinating
things, but they're…
The second major family of encryption techniques is called transposition ciphers. I find transposition ciphers to be
rather dull; in their pure form, they're very simple, and not very difficult
to crack, even without computers. But some of the most sophisticated
modern ciphers can be looked at as…
When a family migrates, the members who pick up the local lingo first and best are generally the children, and they soon become little interpreters. My wife wrote letters to the Swedish authorities for her Chinese dad from the time she was 11. And when time rolled around for the biannual talk with…
The starting point talking about encryption is to understand
what the point of it is; what it's supposed to do, what problems it's supposed to avoid.
Encryption is fundamentally about communication: you've got two parties who want to communicate, but don't want anyone else to be able to listen in…
Ooohhhhh! You're so mean to make her work so hard like that! Really cool though. Much respect :)
I helped her along a bit and she enjoyed it! She's eight.
I was going to make a Chinese language student's joke and say that if you really wanted to drive her nuts and have her scrambling all over the house, you could use romanised Cantonese without the tone marks.
I once had a student look after my house while I was away. When I returned, I found a note on the door in Cyrillic letters. I was unable to make sense of it as Russian or Serbian and was considering the possibility that my knowledge of these languages was even worse than I realized when the light bulb lit up and I read the message right off. Although written in Cyrillic letters, the note was actually in Japanese.