This is the first message on this page in fifty post per page format:
Wait, someone might actually solve it within a week with a hint, and then I won't have time to give it to the cipher-genius I know and take the credit 
Things Ozarck said
Not a substitution cipher,
repetition of strings,
Trigrams, not direct to english,
Baconian cipher,
skip sequencing,
adfgx cipher,
posssible to have three trigrams per letter,
VonNost was not romantic or idealistic
Things Hapah said
I thought about how PW would make a cipher
He wouldn't make it simply brute force
using a key to change enciphering alphabets
using triple symbol trigram (ddd, lll, ppp, ttt, ooo) as a signal to switch alphabets
PW won't give specifics
Things people said
maybe represented puncuation, maybe not. (I know of no classic cipher that does)
the BiggerFish suggested noise (i.e. random added trigrams that don't translate)
Toaster said
there is a key, it's not long
Nikitian said
Rhyming might matter, Don't overcomplicate it, PW might withhold information (in this case, VonNost's first name) because we didn't ask.
Things PW said
You are right about the key and it's brevity (current opinion is that this was addressed to Hapah, who banked on VonNost over "Love, Doctor VonNost")
Parisbre describes essentially a truncated vignere cipher
Tomasque suggests use of medical terminology
I believe these are all the things of substance that was said on this fifty post page, before PW's hint. I exclude things such as Hapah asking if anyone else were working on this, and discussion such as how many tokens a hint could be, as well as other seemingly irrelevant data. I think I was a little generous with what I allowed as relevant, but there's no point excluding possible things at the start. If you feel that I missed something someone said that might fit, please say so.
Now we can look at what is more likely and less likely as being "fairly vital" in the process.
I submit these as more likely:
Adfgx cipher combined with some additional method of defeating frequency analysis
trigram cipher with some additional method of defeating frequency analysis
Skip sequencing
use of multiple alphabets (this includes parisbre's suggestion of using VonNost as the header letters for those alphabets, and Hapah's suggestion of using triple symbol trigrams to switch alphabets)
I submit these as less likely:
Rhyming as important
medical knowledge as important
baconian cipher
punctuation
the first two because they would only reveal themselves in the plaintext, and breaking the final stage to get plaintext usually relies on common Eenglish words rather than technical words or poetic conventions. Though, in military useage, lots of "common" words were military themed: "attack," "defend," uhhhh, someething about time and location ...
as for baconian cipher, I just feel that my tests yeilded mostly noise from that cipher, so feel fre to pursue it
and for punctuation, as I stated above, I know of no classic Cipher (or any other, really) that encodes it.
Author
Topic: The Doctor's Cipher. (Read 37220 times)