Posts

• Oct 31, 2009

  Creating an interactive cryptogram solver (Part IV)

  

  I’ve been working hard on this part of the series because I really wanted the interactive cryptogram solver to make it quick and painless to jump right into solving and still give you plenty of room to expand the functionality and reflect your own style of solving. In this part of the series, we will create solver.py which will become our gateway to solving. It will allow us to quickly select a cipher class that we want to work with. We will also add a self documenting system that will allow us to use the solver without memorizing all the commands or shortcuts that each solver class may use. So, lets just jump right back into the code!

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• Sep 23, 2009

  Creating an interactive cryptogram solver (Part III)

  

  In Part I and Part II of this series we created the framework for our interactive solver and finally had a working AristocratSolver class. In this part, we will enhance our existing framework by adding some commonly used functions, add frequency counting of characters and character sequences to the AristocratSolver class, add the ability to display the current plaintext and ciphertext keys to the AristocratSolver class and then finally create a PatristocratSolver class that reuses all our work in the AristocratSolver class.

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• Sep 21, 2009

  Creating an interactive cryptogram solver (Part II)

  

  In Part I of this series we started creating the framework for our solver by creating the Cipher and Aristocrat classes. You are probably thinking “This is a series about interactive solvers but this is all code!” Well, the classes inheriting from Cipher will be the ones doing all the work in our solver. In this part of the series we will finally create the CipherSolver class that will work with the Cipher classes to interactively get the work done. So lets just jump right into the code so we can finally get to our first working solver, the AristocratSolver class!

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• Sep 19, 2009

  Creating an interactive cryptogram solver (Part I)

  

  In this post we’ll first analyze what we are trying to accomplish and then begin to create an extensible framework that will allow us to adapt our solver to many different kinds of ciphers.

  Building the framework

  Our main goal is to create an extensible interactive solver, so lets break down the similarities that all ciphers have.  You’ve got to think really generic here. All ciphers have the following similarities:

  1. They manipulate some kind of text.
  2. They have an encryption algorithm.
  3. They have a decryption algorithm.

  With these three building blocks we can start creating our base framework.  Lets create a brand new folder that will contain all our source code and files that we will use.  I’m going name my folder “CryptogramSolver”.  Whenever we create new files or want to execute anything, it will be done from this location.

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