Something that my friend had noticed was that when we scrambled a puzzle twice in a row, the two keys would be different, but only in the first half. The third and fourth digits were the same. At first I thought that this might be due to scrambling the same grid, but further exploration suggested that it was entirely due to temporal proximity. So naturally, I tried running two instances of the Across Lite program at the same time, and hit Alt-S S on both of them as quickly as possible. In this way I obtained two grids scrambled with the same key.
With this technique, I had my first inroad, a way to start making some actual progress in the investigation. I could now create two crossword grids that differed in some specific way, scramble them both with the same key, and then compare the results, seeing directly how a change input affected the scrambled output.
This blog exists purely as a place for me to dump random links and thoughts I have rather than emailing them to my friends. It'll have large amounts of inside jokes. Also there will probably be times when I write "you" or refer to an email. Just pretend that you are reading an email to you. If you don't know me you likely won't find anything here interesting. If you do know me you also will not find anything here interesting.
Sunday, February 16, 2014
Cryptic Crossword: Amateur Crypto and Reverse Engineering
http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/txt/acre.html
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