Dissection
Next time before I post another cryptography puzzle, I should probably check on my schedule to see whether I have the luxury of time to entertain all the IM messages that have been flooding my desktop screen ever since I posted the entry. But it was fun nevertheless. Some of the messages were very hillarious too. For some of you, this might have been your first exposure to the fundamental theory of cryptology and I’m so happy you enjoy it.
K, now back to the dissection of this encrypted text. Not all, in fact most of my readers are not computer science centric or tech savvy to start with. Some read text-manipulation thriller novel and some dont. Some love puzzle and some dont. We have a little bit of everything here. So I’m going to try to be as detail as possible.
At first, I gave you these 1’s and 0’s
01010100010100000010000001001110010101100100010001001001010101010010000
001010000010100000101011001001111010001110010000001010000010100110101010
1010101100100111100100000010000100101010101000110010011010101101000100000
These are binary characters. The binary system (base two) is a representation for numbers that uses only zeroes and ones as digits.
For example, the number 2 if being represent in binary of bit 4 would be 0010. This is because (0)+(0)+(2^1)+(0) = 2. Another example, the number 7 would be represented as 0111 because (0)+(2^2)+(2^1)+(2^0) = 7.
Also, every alphabets from A-Z is represented by a number called ASCII values. The full table of ASCII values for all characters is shown here.
Now here’s how we convert an alphabet to a number of just 0 and 1. Lets take capital A for instance. From the table you can see that it is represented by an ASCII value of 065, or 65. 65 in binary would be 01000001 because (0)+(2^6)+(0)+(0)+(0)+(0)+(0)+(2^0) = 65. So if you convert each one of the binary back to alphabet characters, you will get the following:
JNJTT ZPVTP NVDIU PPVOG PSUVO BUFMZ
This doesnt look like a sentence, does it? Now here’s the fun part. Each alphabet in the row above is shifted by one alphabet position to the right meaning alphabet ‘A’ would equal to ‘B’, ‘B’ equal to ‘C’, ‘C’ equal to ‘D’ and so on. So we just need to switch it back one position to the left and see whether the resulting sentence make any sense at all. This kind of alphabte shifting is called caesar cipher in cryptology. You can shift by 4 or 20 to the left or right should you choose to do so.
By shifting all alphabets above to the left, we get:
IMISS YOUSO MUCHT OOUNF ORTUN ATELY
Just rearraging the spaces a bit, you will get
I miss you so much too, unfortunately.
There you go ^_^
