We have !encryption@lemmy.world (I'm one of its mods) which is very quiet, so we could use some activity there.
this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2023
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No such thing. Ask away!
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Thanks. I looked for a lot of communities when I first joined, but it's a lot of work to periodically look for all my interests again and if they do exist check by post count.
How often should I post these?
Those kinds of puzzles? Hmm, it looks like you got some response at !encryption and I'm glad to see some activity there, but in general it's intended to be more about modern, computer-based cryptography. You might like to read "The Code Book" by Simon Singh which is a general introduction to the subject, starting with old fashioned hand ciphers like the one you posted, and moving up through the modern stuff. "The Codebreakers" by David Kahn is a wonderful history-of-cryptography book, mostly about the pre-WW2 era. And the greatest crypto story ever told is the WW2 Enigma attack, which probably shortened the war by years. "Battle of Wits" by Stephen Budiansky is a good book about that. Kahn's book came out in the 1960s when the Enigma story was still classified. There was a later edition where a brief mention was added, but it didn't say much.
I've watched the Imitation game. Cool movie!
It wasn't my point or intention to delve deeper into this matter. The Pigpen Cypher has been enough for me and I use it casually for fun. I'm no professional at any rate to this topic and I don't look into studying encryption 🙂
Well, if that's the case and this stuff is too old, I'm happy to have provided one puzzle of this kind to that community and I can leave it at that 😄
The history of encryption is really cool even completely ignoring the technical side. All kinds of amazing spy stories. Those books I mentioned are full of them.
Some of the computer science people on Lemmy would probably be happy to help. Lemmy ML has a Programming community, for example.