For common word comparison, the top 250 most common English words have been used with contractions removed. The frequency of letters in the English language are well known and are used here, for example. The final solution that is presented is chosen by formulating scores for each candidate solution based upon letter frequency and common word prevalence. Since there is no practical way to check grammatical structure, only whether each word has been replaced by an English word, there are typically multiple solutions to the puzzle. The puzzle is solved if all unknown characters have been replaced. If a rule is applied and any of the unsolved words have no candidate solutions that rule is discarded.

It is assumed that a valid replacement rule is one-to-one, in the sense that one uppercase character maps to exactly one lowercase character and that no lowercase character is represented by more than one uppercase character.Ī replacement rule is applied to the puzzle and the process repeats recursively, allowing the rule to grow as more characters become known. Once a list of candidate words has been created they can be used to form string replacement rules. Second, words are converted to string patterns so that Mathematica's DictionaryLookup function can be used to find candidate words for each pattern. All characters are converted to uppercase letters that represent unknowns. A similar approach is taken here to make decryption reasonably fast.įirst, the puzzle is reduced to a list of words in their encrypted form. Human intuition allows us to solve these puzzles by using what we know about the structure of language to limit possibilities. A brute force approach will eventually solve any encrypted puzzle, but the practicality of such an approach is diminished by the staggering number of possibilities that must be tried.

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