Reply To: The story
Since it’s near the end of the week and the hints have been posted in the case files, I think it’s okay to talk about my experience with challenge 5B, which consisted predomaninatly of trying every transposition cipher I could think of for an afternoon, having seen the frequency distribution. I’d seen the allusion to Vigenere in 5A, but had guessed it was going to be a clue for challenge 6+.
So the realisation that not only was it Vigenere, but a choice of key word I should have guessed, and one that left the majority of the text unencrypted, made me feel a little foolish. But leaving a lot of unchanged text *would* make the frequencies look a lot like transposition – so I conclude that our puzzlemaster is a cruel one that enjoys the sound people make while they’re kicking themselves. You win this round. *Shakes fist*.