To my 7 loyal readers and the 200 people that viewed/hit my page last friday after I posted the PI math problem, I have your answer. Let me say that this is a pretty good way to solve the problem but I don't really agree with the problem definition of "alphabetic shift cipher" and the way the actual answer played out. On the other hand, I KNEW "mathmovesu" had to be part of the answer but I thought it was at the beginning. Oh well. I did love some of the comments the original post got -both relating to the math AND/OR the pudding! Quite randomly addictive!
Answer:
“The digits of p can be obtained from the internet. The most common digit can also be found by doing a search on Google. One way is to load the 100,000 digits into Word. Use the find and replace functions to take out any carriage returns or other non-digits. Then use the find and replace to change each digit to another character, like an “x”. The find and replace will tell you how many it removed. Doing this you can see that the digit “1” is the most common. I also used Word to find the longest monotonic continuous integer sequence. In Word, I used the find function to look for sequences of “12345” etc. Each time it found one I looked to see what the number preceding and following was to see if there was a longer sequence. It turns out that “12345” is the longest sequence in the first 100,000 digits. So that becomes the key for decrypting the message. There are 15 characters. The first is shifted backwards 1 letter in the alphabet, the second 2, the third 3, the fourth 4, the fifth 5 and then it repeats, the sixth 1 and so on. This turns JNRZJNCWLRPXHWZ into ILOVEMATHMOVESU which is the answer!”
Showing posts with label monotonic continuous integer sequence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label monotonic continuous integer sequence. Show all posts
Friday, March 20, 2009
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
