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[spinalsoup]

QUESTION/PUZZLE: Help with solving some code that I`ve found

[Ehsan]

First look at the numbers and see if you notice anything. The first thing I noticed is that there aren't any 8's or 9's.

This leads you to conclude that this could be an Octal code ( Base 8 ).

The next helpful step is to cound the total digits. There are 198, which is divisible by 2, 3, 6, or 9. Anything bigger is too long. We try the first one (2 digits):

12 61 45 15 40 54 04 01

Doesn't really look interesting. Let's try with 3 digits:

126 145 154 054 040 162 151 156

Which looks very interesting because all of them start with 0 or 1. The probablity of that happening at random is very very low. So we know we're dealing with 3 digit Octal code.

The next step would be to run it through a substitution cipher. Basically this means you figure out the frequency of any given number, and then try to figure out what words you can make if you substitute that number with a letter, leading you to figure out what table was used to encode the text.

Fortunately for us, the code uses the standard ascii table so we don't need to do any fancy stuff. Directly mapping we get 126 = V, 145 = e, etc. etc.

The full answer is:

[spinalsoup]

That made sense. Thanks for helping out; analyzing it is actually fun when someone takes time to explain it