Just Widgets Blog

Although I’m one of the few people left on earth who hasn’t read The Da Vinci Code (buy it), I’ve been playing The Da Vinci Code Quest on Google anyway for the past 23 days. The daily puzzles are not too challenging but, as a former Google shareholder, I think it’s kind of slick how they get people exposed to their products like maps and book search when solving the questions.

While looking through a Da Vinci Challenge-related blog there’s a link to the BREAK the CIPH3R.comwebsite. It’s an interesting idea - pay $5 to get the code and if you solve it first you get all the other players’ money + the $100 initial pot. I feel bad for the three guys who run the site because of their are only eight(!) paying contestants so far. The first cipher’s deadline has been extended as a result. There could be more people trying it who have not paid up because they give an excerpt of the enciphered text on the site. The sample cipher text is very tempting since it contains what appears to be four different two-letter words: 3i, q6, 98 and 34. Given that their are not too many common two-letter words in the English language its not too hard to get some start on possible substitutions. However, they are definately not using a simple substitution cipher since the cipher text contains numbers and special characters like ^, *, and $ as well as most of the letters of alphabet. Although the site claims that it’s possible to solve with pencil and paper, I’ve been using some tools like awk and Yahoo’s web api to try to make some progress.