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IsilZha t1_ixwo0ri wrote

Reply to comment by viper_in_the_grass in Emperor Charles V's secret code cracked after five centuries | Spain by future_md_dropout

Hah, that last part about nonsense letters especially reminds me...

My friend and I in 7th grade made our own written code. It was just letter replacement with new symbols, but:

The written spacing was irrelevant. We had several characters that all just took the place of spaces. When writing something out it would have random spaces.

And much like that last part, we also had several nonsense characters that meant nothing.

I would have saved what we had made, except I recall after we memorized it we destroyed/thew out all the answer keys, on purpose. lol I hardly remember any of it now.

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LegalAction t1_ixwy2co wrote

You made a Caesar cypher. Can you decode why it's called a Caesar cypher?

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IsilZha t1_ixwyj3o wrote

eh, it's a substitution cipher. A Caesar cipher is specifically doing a fixed letter shift (IE: go 8 letters to the right) with the same alphabet. We made up entirely new symbols. We also added dummy symbols and symbols for spaces and wrote it out randomly spaced.

I mean, it was still 7th grade kid level, for sure. lol

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LegalAction t1_ixwzr9g wrote

Have you seen one of these?

You need to know the diameter of the stick to get the letters to line up correctly.

It can probably be brute forced, but it would take a minute if you are carving these things by hand.

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