Puzzle Tools

Various useful pages for solving puzzles.

Caesar Shift

Generates all twenty-six possible caesar shifts of an input phrase, for rapid perusal. With some extra features.

• Reverse: Show a string and its reverse -- for when you don't know which way the encoded text is facing

• Double: Write two copies of a string in a row -- for when you don't know where the encoded text begins

• Highlight: Highlight the outputs that look most like English

Highlighting the most English-like outputs

The method for highlighting the most promising outputs is a heuristic based on trigram distribution. The repository comes with a distribution file that's ready to go. If you're interested in re-generating the distribution file, you'll need wget, python, and unzip available on your system. Then run:

$ cd shift/distribution
$ make

Anaquote

Helps you solve anaquote puzzles by interactively rearranging trigrams.

Testing

To run the unit tests:

1. Install yarn.
2. Install node.js packages:

   $ yarn
   

3. Run the tests:

   $ yarn test
   

Word prefix list

To regenerate the word prefix list:

$ anaquote/processWordList.js < vendor/NPLCombinedWordList.txt > anaquote/wordListPrefixes.json