We had about 16 people at last night's tech meeting. Bill Ricker started us off by presenting some scripts he's written for analyzing and creating cryptograms, interspersed with interesting tidbits from the history of cryptography.
I followed with some scripts I've written for solving cryptograms. We also discussed some of the shortcomings to my brute force approach, particularly the problem of proper nouns. Tim then reviewed a short script that finds words whose digital sums add up to 666. (e.g. cat = 3+1+20 = 24) Except it really looks for 111, because it multiplies the digital sum by 6, because that's what the TV evangelist who inspired this script did. We had fun looking through the words that the script found. After that people threw out a few questions for discussion. One was the tab-delimited file transposition issue that's already been posted to the list. Another was about recursively copying directories in Perl; the File::NCopy module was suggested. These sites have links to many word lists, if you're interesting in writing your own scripts like those we discussed: http://www.puzzlers.org/wordlists/dictinfo.php http://wordlist.sourceforge.net/ The pizza and soda were generously sponsored by monger Greg London. Greg has two books available through his website, _Impatient Perl_ and _Hunger Pangs_, a science fiction novel. http://www.greglondon.com/ Next month's meeting will be on Tuesday, December 14 in our usual room in the Kenmore Classroom Building. Ronald _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
