Scratch

Hey, I recently found smartirishkid's 'codemaster' project and decided to expand on it to make a random cipher. That part I had no problem doing, but what I want to do now is to have it generate a cipher key that can be entered into the program to re-create the exact cipher used to make a phrase.

For instance, let's say you put in 'test' and get 'pstp'. if you were to restart the program and try to decode the code word you'd get a completely incorrect response (unless you are unimaginably lucky). However, if you are given a cipher key along with 'pstp' then you'd be able to enter the key and get 'test' as the decoded word.

Now, the simple solution to this is to have a very long cipher key that is 26 figures long, with numbers 1-26 representing each letter in the cipher. But there's no fun in that! So now here's what I need help with:

I want to create a program that can make a fairly short series of numbers and/or letters from a cipher (the cipher is a 26 character list) that contains every letter in the alphabet only once. here's a random cipher from my program as an example:

f, v, u, b, a, o, r, h, e, x, w, q, l, m, t, k, s, j, c, n, z, g, y, d, p, i

In order to be practical it should be at the most 13 characters long. And, after creating a key, the program should be able to take that same key and derive the correct cipher from it.

I've spent a lot of time pondering this problem and have come to the conclusion that I can't do it on my own    so any help at all would be appreciated. I don't want to put an unfinished project on the site but if you want to look at the programming then I'll put it up.

I'm thinking of trying my hand at version 1.4 to see if the new commands will help this problem. Thanks!

Last edited by mb1350 (2009-07-02 00:20:22)