Morrowind talk:Delivery for Bivale Teneran
Decoding the message[edit]
Is there some forum where the decoding of Nileno's orders here, and of Edryno Arethi's treasury report, has been discussed? It seems that these messages have still not been decoded. I once put a few hours into trying to spot patterns, but no luck.
The similarities between them are pretty clear: they're both in four-letter groups, which is probably a typographical distraction, and they share many characters in sequence, up to the 3-letter group "DSH", but diverge completely thereafter. It seems very likely that they use the same code.
Surely many people have torn their hair out over these messages: I was wondering where, if anywhere, the hair got torn.
For what it's worth, here are the similarities I noted in the opening passages of the two messages. They have letters in common, and in sequence, as follows:
Edryno's report: KJAHSD FHKL J H F A K LSDJH FAKL DSH ...
Nileno's orders: AKJ SDHF K AJEHNFFAJKW HEF K JADSH ...
In particular, the opening 8-9 characters of each message are largely anagrams of one another, with just an extra 'H' in Edryno's message.
Edryno's report: KJA H SD FH K ...
Nileno's orders: AKJ SD HF K ...
The letters A D F H J K N S predominate in both documents (9-19 occurrences per message each, as opposed to 0-9 for every other letter). Nileno's message uses all letters of the alphabet, Edryno's omits M T X Z.
H is somewhat more common in Edryno's report (14 uses) than in Nileno's orders (9 uses). M and T are not used at all in Edryno's report, but appear 8 and 5 times respectively in Nileno's orders. Other letters don't seem to have wildly divergent frequencies between the two messages.
Since Master Aryon and Divayth Fyr use a cipher based on two-letter combinations, I tried investigating these, but without success. Most two-letter combinations (ignoring spaces) occur only once or twice within a single message except for the following (including the opening passage):
- AK . . . 1x Edryno, 3x Nileno
- DS . . . 4x E, 1x N
- KJ . . . 4x E, 5x N
- KL . . . 3x E, 0x N
- OI . . . 2x E, 3x N
- OQ . . . 1x E, 3x N
- SD . . . 4x E, 3x N
I doubt that two-letter pairs are a productive line of enquiry, though the frequency of KJ and SD may be significant.
Anyway, I didn't get anywhere. I don't know anything about cryptography, though. But maybe posting something about it may prompt someone else to investigate and succeed.
Petrushka 02:13, 29 November 2008 (EST)