Watch a couple episodes of the Sopranos and you will hear tons of this used.
A good example of a cipher that makes sense either side of coding is Conan Doyle’s Dancing Men, from the Sherlock Holmes story The Adventure of the Dancing Men.
What I mean by ‘makes sense’ here is that it looks just like a bunch of doodles, rather than a nonsensical string of coded characters, demanding decipherment.
I’m pretty sure also, that given a big enough volume of text in which to hide it, and a short enough message, it would be possible to encode a message without rendering the carrier text unreadable or ungrammatical, in the same sort of way that Digimark codes can be embedded in images without noticeably changing them.
OK, it’s perhaps a bit easier in images, because subtly changing the hue or brightness of one pixel here and there can easily go unnoticed, however, I think a similar thing could be done with text, providing that the encoding algorithm knew enough about correct grammar, spelling and word definition - using synonyms and altered (but still valid) phraseology instead of altering pixel colours.
Ah, screwed up, did I? I’m not surprised: I was posting about 4 a.m. after a pleasant evening of wine and crackers and more wine…
More seriously, no matter how often I reminded myself that 0 (zero) = even, my mind kept reading it as O (letter O) = odd. I caught and fixed that mistake many times, obviously not enough.
Glad the cypher works for your game, but I suggest you double or triple check your coded message.
Do you mean, hints in the coded text (Five is my favorite number) (Who’d have thought I’d ever find a use for binary) and such? Or hints outside the message, like leaving a chart with the alphabet and their binary equivalents tucked conspicuously in a book? The latter sounds neater.
Do let us know if your guests turn out to be code breakers.
Something like the latter. I’m thinking that they could find cryptic notes scribbled by the guy receiving the code as he got that month’s code over the phone.
I will.
There was an example of this in the Series of Unfortunate Events movie (presumably also in the book, but I haven’t read that one). A charater known for her impeckable spelling left a seeminly-innocuous note for the children, but with mispellings scattered through it. The letters involved in the misspellings speeled out a secret mesage.
CKGSES? I knew it!
Bumping this to give the answer. They weren’t, but they were soooooooo close to solving it that I had all the trouble in the world keeping a straight face when they were working at it.
Too bad! I hope they were able to solve the overall mystery by other routes.
And thanks for letting me know.
Simple, funny and genuine from just the other day: AN Wilson is a shit.
I imagine that it was just too hard, but if you can figure out this then by all means feel free to use the encryption method.