gjm comments on Stupid Questions March 2015 - Less Wrong

5 Post author: Gondolinian 03 March 2015 11:37PM

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Comment author: gjm 07 March 2015 11:38:42PM 0 points [-]

Yup. (One handy trick is to take message - shift(message,k) mod 26 for candidate values of k, and see which has a histogram that looks most like that of (English text minus other English text). But it's probably actually better to find good candidate shifts for each evenly-spaced subset of the text and look for ones that match up.)

JRMayne's latest sample is still pretty short. It might require human cleverness to solve. If I have time tomorrow (and unless someone else has done it first) I may have a go.

Comment author: gjm 09 March 2015 12:53:47AM 0 points [-]

(No, didn't have time. Sorry. Probably no time on Monday either...)