Hiya!
I’ve been looking madly around for a place to ask, where could I post a (question) post related to ciphering languages.
There’s one I have been using and I’d like to try kickstart this topic genre somewhere (I’m unsure about making a whole community about it).
How often should I post these?
Those kinds of puzzles? Hmm, it looks like you got some response at !encryption and I’m glad to see some activity there, but in general it’s intended to be more about modern, computer-based cryptography. You might like to read “The Code Book” by Simon Singh which is a general introduction to the subject, starting with old fashioned hand ciphers like the one you posted, and moving up through the modern stuff. “The Codebreakers” by David Kahn is a wonderful history-of-cryptography book, mostly about the pre-WW2 era. And the greatest crypto story ever told is the WW2 Enigma attack, which probably shortened the war by years. “Battle of Wits” by Stephen Budiansky is a good book about that. Kahn’s book came out in the 1960s when the Enigma story was still classified. There was a later edition where a brief mention was added, but it didn’t say much.
I’ve watched the Imitation game. Cool movie!
It wasn’t my point or intention to delve deeper into this matter. The Pigpen Cypher has been enough for me and I use it casually for fun. I’m no professional at any rate to this topic and I don’t look into studying encryption 🙂
Well, if that’s the case and this stuff is too old, I’m happy to have provided one puzzle of this kind to that community and I can leave it at that 😄
The history of encryption is really cool even completely ignoring the technical side. All kinds of amazing spy stories. Those books I mentioned are full of them.