Morrowind talk:Delivery for Bivale Teneran

Decoding the message

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)