Question

You intercepted the following message from Boris and Natasha.

25 19 19 30 41 17 15 26 27 41 15 28 18 41 18 29 41 34 22 19 41 27 15 34 22

You do not now the encoding or decoding function but from previous work with Boris and Natasha you know their encoding and decoding functions are always linear and have 1 as the coefficient of x. You also know this message consists of 6 words.

a. How would you decoding the message? Explain your strategy in complete sentences using proper grammar and correct spelling.

b. Identify the decoding function. Show your work.

c. What is the message?

Please help!!

Answer 1

9514 1404 393

Answer:

KEEP CALM AND DO THE MATH

Explanation:

a) Our decoding strategy is to try to determine the mapping of code numbers to letters by looking at the range and/or frequency of the numbers. The minimum code value is 15, and the maximum is 41. We assume this means the value 15 corresponds to the letter A. Since the code is linear and the coefficient is 1, we assume this is a simple substitution code. We can find the letter number by subtracting 14 from the code number.

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b) The decoding function will be ...

alphabet[n-14]

where alphabet[x] returns the x-th letter of the alphabet, and n is the code number. Subtracting 14 from the message numbers gives alphabet index number ...

11, 5, 5, 16, 27, 3, 1, 12, 13, 27, 1, 14, 4, 27, 4, 15, 27, 20, 8, 5, 27, 13, 1, 20, 8

The value 27 refers to a non-alphabetic character, which we choose to interpret as a space. The attachment shows the relation between these numbers and letters of the alphabet.

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c) The message is ...

KEEP CALM AND DO THE MATH