Thursday, December 18, 2014

Changes 12/18/14

Continued working with Sam on the UMD contest problem 6 - Breaking Vigenere Cipher, which required you to develop a program to find the probable length of the keyword used to scramble a string by looking at distances between repeated patterns of letters.  First, we identified the frequencies of each three letter combination appearing in the text.  Next, for any combination that appeared more than once, we found the distance between the indexes of those combinations.  Finally, we found the values between 4 and 20 (this range was given to us in the problem description) that were factors of the distances we found.  If a factor matched up with more than 90% of the distances, it was added to a results array.  Sam did most of the work on this, and I helped him out with some stuff.  I would like to review the code in more depth so that I can understand his approach a little bit better, though.  I'll definitely read his blog on this topic.

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