I like puzzles. One class of puzzles that is fun to do that is also amenable to computer aid in solution is that of cryptograms. In my old website, I had a few simple crytogram related web tools, but I think they were not well appreciated since they were buried quite deep among many other ``computer programming'' related things.
So now, we have a special section dedicated to cryptogram tools.
Cryptogram Tools
After spending some time, I have managed to port the old cryptogram tools over. These tools are for messing with traditional cryptograms of the substitution variety. These tools do not have auto-solving capabilities.
- Preprocessor to generate only stream of letters.
- ROT13 cipher.
- Caesar-shift cipher.
- Mono-alphabetic substitution cipher.
- Vigenère Cipher (poly-alphabetic substitution with Caesar-shift ciphers).
- Poly-alphabetic substitution cipher.
Some other important points to note about these tools:
- They all assume the use of the standard English alphabet, i.e.
A-Z
anda-z
. - Many Latin-extended characters are conflated to their base character class. So things like `
À
' and `Á
' are considered as letter `A
'. - Enciphering and deciphering preserves the case of the text.
- Keys are not case sensitive.
- Keys (especially for the mono-alphabetic family ciphers) are ``compressed'', i.e. they retain the same order of letters that appear, with duplicates removed, before being padded with what is left of the alphabet. So the key ``
squeamish ossifrage
'' becomes ``squeamihofrgbcdjklnptvwxyz
''.
Naturally, the details of each cipher can be found in their own pages.