Zodiac webtoy: Another update

I’ve finally made some more updates to the Zodiac webtoy! The biggest change is the addition of simple letter-frequency statistics.



Remember when Ralphie cracked the “secret code” in A Christmas Story?
Ralphie: [Reading his decoding]: “Be… sure… to… drink… your… Ovaltine. Ovaltine? A crummy commercial?!? Son of a bitch!!”

Here is the list of noteworthy changes:

  • Added frequency tabulations for symbols, decoded plaintext letters, and expected letter frequencies (as specified here). Frequency analysis of this sort might be useful to cracking the cipher. Eventually, I would like to include more n-gram statistics (occurrences of letter combinations of length n) to make this more useful.
  • Added the 408 cipher, which has a known (and creepy) solution. Click on the “Switch to 408 cipher” link to see it. The known solution link is below the 408 cipher (it is labeled “The correct one” next to “Interesting decoders”).
  • Fixed some formatting bugs that were causing the columns of the cipher grid to get squashed.

The webtoy seems to be getting much slower in Internet Explorer 6. I’ve not tested it in Internet Explorer 7. But it works pretty well in Firefox and Safari. I am afraid of all the horrible, horrible JavaScript code that I wrote – Please let me know of any problems you find! If you find the new version to be too crappy, you can still use the old version by clicking here.

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