this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2024
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I often do experiments involving randomness, art, math, NLP, cryptography and programming.
In my most recent experiment as from yesterday, I created a novel ciphering method. I mean, I guess it's totally different from known ciphering methods (such as Vigenere, Caesar, Playfair, ROT13 and so on) because I couldn't find anything similar.
Some examples follow:
((1,8,8), (6,6,5), (5,4), ø, ø, (1,2), (0,0), ø, (2,1), ø)
(in the way I'm using it for now, the cipher will always result in 10 tuples containing a variable amount of tuples, with ø indicating an empty tuple; there are lots of output formatting alternatives: here I’m using an one-liner mathematical representation in order to be compact).((0,1,5), (1,9,1,1,2,3,3), (0,5), (1,2), ø, (1), ø, ø, ø, (1))
((0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,1,2), (0,0,1,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,2), (0,1,0,1,2,2,3,4,5,6), (0,1,2), (0,1,2), (0,1,2), (0,1), (0,1), (0,1), (1,2))
((0,1,1,1), (0,0), ø, ø, ø, ø, ø, ø, ø, ø)
I'll keep a puzzle spirit and I won't explain it for now. The only hint is that the previous examples consider the English alphabet as so: A=01, B=02, C=03, all the way until Z=26 (yeah, the leading zero matters to this ciphering method). If you're a programmer, think in terms of pointers, or even better, an unidirectional linked list. If you're a mathematician, try to visualize a graph.
The cipher doesn't rely just on its principles, it also needs a corresponding mapping set (which can be alphabetical but can also contain non-letters, even emojis or hieroglyphs; the order will matter), and it also needs to know where to start the traversal path (the given examples start at the zeroeth tuple, but it could start anywhere). It's both deterministic (because there's a single correct path) and chaotic (because the result depends on other variables such as the mapping set, the initial position to start traversing, which element to take (whether the first or the last, FIFO or LIFO) and what numeric base to use (the examples used base-10, but it can be done as hexadecimal, octal, binary, or virtually any numerical base)). So I guess it has a lot of potential, not just for cryptography.