Re: puzzle with string permutations [photo]

[Marcin Borkowski <mbork@mbork.pl>]

On 2022-06-07, at 08:39, Emanuel Berg <incal@dataswamp.org> wrote:

> Try to solve this - not easy!
>
>   https://dataswamp.org/~incal/pimgs/survivor-puzzle.png
>
> It is from US/CBC Survivor S42E13 around 9 minutes in.
>
> It says
>
>   eht kudtce pigelsen tagni ogod seot erontuf si ni fo hte
>
> Easy LOL :) The first word should be "the"!

I'm not sure if it's just permutations.  "kudtce" could be "tucked", but
"erontuf"?

Anyway, I would personally permute only consonants - if the vowels are
out of order, the brain can often fill in the blanks pretty easily.
Also, it would be great to leverage ispell to exclude non-words from the
list of permutations - unfortunately, I don't know how to do it
(`ispell-word' looks pretty magical to me, at least after ~10 minutes of
looking - maybe if I had more time...)

But this made me think - one could write a simple game (a bit like M-x
decipher) to help decipher "permutation-based secret messages".  Looks
like a fun project.

Also, you don't have to list all the permutations to _count_ them -
Emacs can actually compute factorials:

(calc-eval "fact(5)") => "120"
(calc-eval "fact(10)") => "3628800"

Best,

-- 
Marcin Borkowski
http://mbork.pl