Alright, guess I'll give my thoughts!
I don't know how you guys went at it, but I'll let you know how I started. The first thing I did, after copying the text down and breaking it up into bigrams and trigrams, was to spend a little bit thinking about how
Piecewise would design a cipher. I know he's not a fool, and I know he isn't gonna do anything quick and easy like a direct substitution cipher. However, I don't think he's a crypto expert or anything, so I imagine one of his first actions was to look up common ciphers, and more importantly, common methods for
breaking ciphers. If he's cooking up his own cipher from scratch, he will include in the encryption process some way to counter these common methods. A little Google searching led me to believe that the most common ways to break codes were frequency analysis (i.e. the letter that appears the most is likely "E", the next most common is "T" and so on) and doubles (like the "O" in Doomarms), a letter that is repeated back-to-back.
I also know that Piecewise is clever and values cleverness, and that the cipher is likely not complex simply for the sake of complexity: he wouldn't encrypt the thing in such a way that the only way to crack it would be to brute-force it. I imagine that the cipher is likely a short set of rules (or perhaps even a single rule) that you follow when encrypting the text, and I bet the key to the cipher fits easily enough on a single sheet of paper. I don't think it'd be the kind of cipher where you have to know or guess a particular key word or anything like that, you just have to figure out the rules, and the cipher will likely be easy to use when encrypting or decrypting a message.
So! After doing this, I sat down and actually looked at the text with the following thoughts in mind:
- The cipher will likely not be mechanically complex.
- The cipher will likely contain some measure to foil frequency analysis
- The cipher will likely contain some measure to foil "doubles"
I did a very quick search, and it appears I might be right on bullet 3 if the list is in trigrams: no 3-symbol string is ever repeated immediately after itself. Frequency analysis definitely yielded some outliers (λФΔ appears 26 times, θФΔ 18, ΔλФ 12, and ФФΩ 14 times, with the other 70 combinations appearing a single-digit number of times).
My first theory was that the text is broken up into trigrams, and that it was composed of multiple (4) different substitution ciphers. In this scenario, the cipher being used would be changed when a double was encountered, and the triple symbols (θθθ, ΔΔΔ, etc) were not text in and of themselves, but rather the signal to move to a particular cipher when decrypting the text. This had several things going for it, in my opinion:
- It was a simple mechanism to keep letters from repeating in the text, one that I could certainly see Piecewise inventing
- It also breaks frequency analysis, as your "E" can now appear as four different combinations of symbols
- Encrypting the text by hand would be as simple as having a column for each of the ciphers, and moving to the relevant column when the signal comes. It is very easy to use.
As an added bonus, if the message is in fact signed "VonNost", this fit cleanly: the last 18 characters were ΩФΩ
θθθθλΔ
ΔФФθθΩ
ФФΩ, with the bold added just to make the 3-groups more visible. ΩФΩ would be "N" in a cipher, θθθ tells you to move to a new cipher, and the next 12 characters correspond to 4 letters (the "Nost" in a different cipher). It was also helped by the fact that some strings repeated several times (as Ozarck pointed out), and these strings seem to behave in consistent, predictable ways. For example, the string "ΔλФΔΔΔλФΔ" is repeated multiple times, and "ΔλФΔΔΔ" was ALWAYS followed by "λФΔ" every time it appears in the text.
Alas,
it is not that simple: the same 3-symbol input gives a different 3-symbol output with the same cipher-change signal (ΩΩΩ). Also, there were two instances where a cipher change was called to the same cipher (i.e. you're on the ΔΔΔ cipher and the symbol comes to go to the ΔΔΔ cipher). I suppose there could be a special rule to just move a column over if this occurs, but it still doesn't fix the first issue. Could be that the ΩΩΩ and possibly the λλλ are special cases and behave differently (θθθ and ΔΔΔ appear 8 and 7 times respectively, ΩΩΩ 4 times and λλλ only once), but I haven't tried to examine what those special cases could be yet. Could also be that I'm just missing something obvious, give me your thoughts!
I feel like I'm onto something, but I'm just missing a lever or trigger or something like that (though everyone thinks they're onto something until conclusively proven wrong, myself included, lol). My current thinking is that the triple signals (θθθ, ΔΔΔ, etc) are not signals to move to a particular column or cipher, but could instead be a signal to move over a particular number of columns in Piecewise's cipher-sheet (i.e. "go right one column", "go left two columns", etc.) Haven't been able to piece together what values for the triples make things sync up (and it's entirely possible that I'm barking up the wrong tree anyway), but there you are!
So! What do you lot have? Any thoughts on this, or your own theories?