Define and discover

Author’s names: Morón, Bethke.

 The last weeks we have been working on Khan Academy in Informatics. We have been working in pairs to solve a mistery where the clues are encrypted. This mission were given to us in Journey into cryptography, in every step they show you images wich leads you to the next clue,there are four clues, each one of this clues have different ways to solve them . Khan Academy gives you the oportunity to learn seeing tutorial videos to solve each clue.Besides the videos there is a way to practice how to find the pattern to solve the clues and to find the meaning from each message too.  

Clue #1

Problem: In the first Clue we have some problems solving the note. First of all the note was written in the Caesar cipher and we didn't know how to solve this cipher. Another problem is that the note doesn't have any dots or comas, so we didn't know when a sentence ended and another started. Also the letters are a bit confusing for example sometimes you can't distinguish a c from an e.

Solution: Khan Academy provides you with a video were you can learn how to solve the Caesar's Cipher. Caesar shifted each letter in his

military commands in order to make them appear meaningless should the enemy intercept it. To solve it you must find out which is the most repeated letter from the text and that letter will stand for an e because it is the most common letter on the English alphabet. This way you know that if for example the most used letter is the H then this becomes an e. So you know the distance between this two letters is 3 so to solve the message you need to count up to three letters from the one given in the text.

Another help that Khan Academy provides you to solve the note is a Ceaser cipher simulator were you write the unsolved text and select the distance between the most repeated letter in the note and the e and the simulator solves the text for you. The coments are sometimes a little helpful for example we found that someone wrote the note again, this way you don´t´get confused between two letters that look alike, because it is written with a computer and not by hand.

Clue #2

Problem: In the second Clue there is a new way to solve a note. In this case is difficult to read all the leters from the message. Another problem we found out about the note is that there are no dots or comas like the first clue, so the sentence we discover at first dosn´t make much sense. Also the note is written in a strange way, the letters appear to have been written randomly and it is impossible to understand.

Solution: To solve the note Khan Academy provides you with two hints. The first one is a video about polyalphabetic cipher. Here they show you that the note was written in a similar way to the but this time repeatetly. Each letter has its own Ceaser cipher and in the video you they teach you how to solve this  looking for an information leak, just like codebreakers do. First oyu need to determine the length of the shift, you will need to go through and check the frecuency distribution of different intervals. When you check the frequency distribution of every fifth letter, the fingerprint or leak will reveal itself and then the only thing left to do is break five Ceasar Ciphers ina repeated sequency.

The second hint Khan Academy provides you with is a video where they show you how the artist Holbein used to paint so precisely that every detail was a message or a reference to something. For example in a painting of his a man is holding a dagger and on that dagger you can see the number 29 written very small that refers to his age. In that way you learn how to pay attention to detail which helps you to breack tho secret mesage written on the note.   

Also, in the bottom of the page Khan Academy wrote the message again so we can distinguish clearly every letter. 

Clue #3

Problem: The text in the Clue #3 was written with numbers instead of letters. There were no dots or commas and we did not know when a sentence ended and another started. A big problem we found is that the note wasn´t complete, some parts from the bottom and the right side were missing so we can´t figure out the hole message.

Solution: In Khan Academy you can watch a video about visual telegraphs to help you solve the message. The video explains how people comunicated throught the ages with visual signals. For example the greeks used fire to send quick messages. And later people started to use a frequency of numbers to refer to every letter so they could send secret messages without the danger of the enemy knowing what that message ment. In the video they show you how every letter has a secuence of numbers which hepls you to figure out the note.
In the coments there are some helpfull advices so you can break the code easier. 

Clue #4

Problem: In the fourth clue we found some papers with random letters, numbers and symbols and our first problem is that we don´t know what that means nor how to solve it. It dosen´t seem to be any sentences because there are no dots or comas. The inscriptions aren´t in order and the notes don´t make sense to us. We don´t know for what are the symbols for, because they didn´t appear in the other clues. 

Solution: