For The Love of Ciphers: A Hop, A Skip and A Jump

For The Love of Ciphers: A Hop, A Skip and A Jump

We have run many classes for kids in cracking ciphers, and generally they love them. There’s a challenge in there, and kids just love a challenge. Their brains are tuned to focus on new puzzles to solve, whereas we have brains that have typically stopped trying to make sense of new challenges, and do not question the things we see. For them, they see a new thing, and want to learn it. But, you should do the same, and not lose that child-like investigation of our world.

One thing that amazes me, is that when you give kids ciphers, you often don’t have to tell them how to solve it, they will work it out for themselves. While we have been taught method, they just use the power of their brain to find new ways of doing things. In fact, I make a point in not telling kids a method of cracking a cipher, as they will often develop their own way. When you ask them how the solved something, the answer is often “I don’t quite know, but I did this and that!”, and that is sheer intelligence.

Go go and learn and exercise the most amazing prize you have been given … your brain! So let’s do a hop, a skip, and a jump!

With the Skip Cipher we jump a given number of characters. For example, if we take a message of ‘Hello’, and jump two characters at a time we get ‘Hloel’. If we have a skip of 3, then:

The social network said its members had expressed concerns that they were missing 'important updates' from the people they cared about.

becomes:

T cleo ii mrh psdoesh eweii mrnuasfmhpp eceauT cleo ii mrh psdoesh eweii mrnuasfmhpp eceauT cleo ii mrh psdoesh eweii mrnuasfmhpp eceau

For example if we have plain text of “01234567”, with a jump of 3 we get:

03614725

Now we take “epnlhtea”, and match:

03614725
epnlhtea

Let’s take the first three charactersof 0, 1 and 2, which are e, l and e:

eleXXXX

Next 3, 4 and 5, which are p, h and a:

elephaXX

Finally for 6 and 6, which are n and t

elephant

Solve the following for the given jump values:

nrepapswe (Jump: 8)

sytiruce (Jump: 7)

Now, try more here:

For innovation, the best people around have brains that are like a child’s brain, and where the question everything, and love solving puzzles. Go on, fall in love with puzzles.