I confess to an obsession with cryptograms. It is the first thing I go to in the morning paper.

Once in a while I get really stuck, so I have built a cheat for myself in RR. It is a cryptogram decoder utility.

I suspect someone has surely developed a crossword puzzle utility, but decoding crytograms is a little different.

For example suppose the encrypted word were

ABCDBA

Each capital letter is a stand-in for another. There is information here that is useful, namely the first and last letters of the decoded word are the same, as are the second and fifth. Suppose one also knew from other words in the puzzle that C stands for the letter s. One would enter into the decoder:

12s*21

The decoder recognizes numbers as stand-ins for like letters, and the letter s for a known letter, and the asterisk for an unknown letter.

Running the decoder with this entry would reveal:

gasbag
museum
pushup

as possible candidates. (Unfortunately it also finds: misaim and rester. This dictionary contains a great many esoteric words.)

I used a public domain word list of 113,000 words which I found on the web. This alone might be useful to someone.

The decoder is on my web site at: http://home.infostations.net/jhurley/decoder.zip

Jim
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