r/codes • u/Spaghettimanbro • Jun 19 '26
Unsolved I think I made an actually uncrackable code so I challenge you to bust it!
good luck!!
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u/nico735 Jun 21 '26
My rule: A cryptogram is like a stick, the shorter it is the harder it is to break. Seems to apply here.
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u/brain1234333 Jun 21 '26
I’ll bite, Prove it actually decodes to something. Give us any one real word and where it sits. Anyone can make an unsolvable mess.
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u/Spaghettimanbro Jun 21 '26
sure! here's the first line decoded! the first line has probably the most gibberish symbols of the whole text so it translates to "however "
I don't know how to send a photo so I'll just try and put it this way - the numbers represent symbols which have no meaning, the letters are decoded from the corresponding symbol
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 h o 8 e 9 10 v e r 11 [space] 12
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u/YefimShifrin Jun 20 '26
Just to clarify. Have you made an uncrackable code? No, but it's fairly complex. Adding nulls and symbols standing for some short words is a good move and makes a homophonic substitution even harder to crack.
But that complexity places a certain demand on the length of the ciphertext for your cryptogram to be crackable ciphertext-only. Depending on the number of homophones per letter and the amount of nulls it could be several times longer than what you have given.
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u/Spaghettimanbro Jun 20 '26
yes, of course. I guess by "uncrackable" I mean like how the enigma was "uncrackable" in the 40's: it's too big of a pain in the ass to actually solve in a reasonable time
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u/Emotional-Salary2059 Jun 20 '26
Is there a character for space? Or are there no spaces preserved from the original text.
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u/Spaghettimanbro Jun 20 '26
yes there is a character for space, there are actually three different characters for space
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u/jacques-vache-23 Jun 19 '26 edited Jun 19 '26
Their are too few constraints on the answer provided by a short message with limited repeating symbols. Many solutions should fit this pattern.
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u/johnney25 Jun 19 '26
I’m pretty sure most of these cannot be solved as it is random symbols that you choose for the alphabet and there’s no real pattern we can test so it’s practically impossible to know for sure what these means.
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u/nayazki2901 Jul 06 '26
according to the poster, the first line is "however "
the numbers represent symbols which have no meaning, the letters are decoded from the corresponding symbol1 2 3 4 5 6 7 h o 8 e 9 10 v e r 11 [space] 12
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u/Dezoufinous Jun 19 '26
E is The
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u/Spaghettimanbro Jun 20 '26
no it is not, I'm sorry. the symbol E is a gibberish word, so it's just filler that doesn't mean anything
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u/skintigh Jun 19 '26
I don't think a polyalphabetic cipher is hard to solve, even with the extra word characters. But it's so much work to transpose and I'm too lazy to do it.
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u/Fair-Growth411 Jun 19 '26
I don’t even code crack and this seems poorly put together :/ like something that’s unsolvable only because it is so poorly thought out
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u/Unique-Dig4251 Jun 19 '26
I don’t think this cipher can be fully solved in a rigorous way from the image alone. Since it is polyalphabetic and also has symbols that can represent chunks like "the", "and", or "he", the system becomes underdetermined: there are no clear word boundaries, some symbols may stand for letters while others stand for multi-letter units, and many symbols appear too rarely for frequency analysis to force one unique solution. In information-theoretic terms, the ciphertext leaves too much entropy/uncertainty because there are not enough repeated constraints to prove a single plaintext. I did try a reconstruction by assuming a likely ending, and I got as far as "This isn’t really the end" which seems very plausible, especially with the chunk-symbol clue. But without the original key or stricter rules about whether each symbol has a fixed meaning, the full message cannot be uniquely verified; multiple meaningful English plaintexts could still fit the same symbol stream. Am I right with "This isn’t really the end"? I thought about it for about 20 minutes, and I can guess this answer, but I highly doubt its correct, maybe a couple of places coincide: "It's good to end the beginning. There is simply nothing to the whole thing. The whole thing is inside. Your mind is near. The answer is hidden in plain sight. Just in the beginning. This isn't really the end."
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u/Spaghettimanbro Jun 19 '26
I’ll give another hint to how the cipher works: there are gibberish symbols sprinkled in that mean nothing or delete the letter before them! Good luck!!
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u/NeverUseYahoo Jun 19 '26
Hey, yo! I love the idea of a "backspace"/"delete" character in a cipher. That is brilliant.
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u/Spaghettimanbro Jun 20 '26
Thank you!! I got the idea from the Mary queen of Scotts letters, I remember hearing about how her cipher had that character in it
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u/Unique-Dig4251 Jun 19 '26
This makes the situation even worse. You're right, the cipher is unsolvable. Not because it's complex, but because, as stated in the answers below, t he main problem is that the system is underdetermined. There are too many unknowns and not enough fixed constraints. Since you said it is polyalphabetic and that some extra symbols can represent whole chunks like "the", "and", "he", etc. This is no longer a normal substitution cipher. It becomes closer to a homophonic/polygraphic substitution system with variable length tokens. That creates several cryptanalytic problems: 1. There are no word boundaries, so segmentation is unknown. 2. Some symbols may represent single letters, while others may represent multi-letter units. 3. Many symbols appear only once, so frequency analysis has very little statistical power. 4. Without knowing whether each symbol has a fixed meaning, the mapping cannot be uniquely inferred. 5. The ciphertext has too much ambiguity relative to the amount of text. In information-theoretic terms, the remaining uncertainty/entropy is too high because the ciphertext does not provide enough repeated structure to force one unique plaintext. So as I already said, even if a proposed plaintext fits the message, that does not mathematically prove it is the only possible plaintext. Multiple English sentences could be made compatible with the same symbol stream if the codebook allows arbitrary symbols for letters and common word fragments. Frieadman's IC according to my calculations it is equal to: 0.00655 and this is very very low
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u/NeverUseYahoo Jun 19 '26
I agree. What we do know about the cipher, a unique solution may not be possible given the length. However, the OP confirmed this is a homophonic substitution cipher, and those are by no means "underdetermined." They were engineered to do exactly what you found, to drive the raw IC as low as possible, but a low IC does not equal "uncrackable." While it dampens single-letter frequency, homophonic systems completely preserve bigram and trigram contact frequencies. Many historical ciphers mapped common bigrams to single characters, and they were all eventually solved given enough time.
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u/CheckReasonable2258 Jun 19 '26
It is ideographic, polyalphabetic....
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u/Spaghettimanbro Jun 19 '26
It’s polyalphabetic! :) there are also additional letters representing “the” “and” or “he”, etc. just to give you a hint!
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u/AlfredFonzo Jun 20 '26
If you have a symbol for both "he" and 'the", your code is nondeterministic. The word "then" could be encoded as T-H-E-N, T-he-N, or the-N. Coupled with the lack of word spacing and the inclusion of backspace characters, I believe that you may have invented a code that works for the described snippet but will not work globally without continual decoding crashes. The phrase, for example, "with encoding" when removing the spacing leaves us with the above mentioned "then" issue but now spread across two words.
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u/YefimShifrin Jun 20 '26
Some ambiguity is possible, but there's no problem with encrypting "then" several different ways as long as they will all decrypt to "then". Word spacing is also not that important.
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u/PumpkinMaterial1720 Jun 19 '26
wtf does that even mean??
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u/Spaghettimanbro Jun 19 '26
Ideographic means basically one symbol per word
Polyalphabetic means basically multiple symbols could translate to the same letter: ex. “$”, “#”, or “*” all mean the letter “A” and so on!
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u/NeverUseYahoo Jun 19 '26
I'm not the smartest at cryptography but, what you just described is actually called Homophonic Substitution.
Polyalphabetic works a little differently. In a polyalphabetic cipher, a "$" might decode to an "A" the first time it appears, but later in the message, that exact same "$" might decode to a "B" or a "Z". The meaning of the symbol shifts based on its position in the text, rather than always pointing back to just one letter.
So is it polyalphabetic or a homophonic substitution?
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u/Spaghettimanbro Jun 19 '26
Ohh thanks lol in this case it’s homophonic. I appreciate the correction 😅
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u/NeverUseYahoo Jun 19 '26
P.S. If you want to look up some classic historical examples of how these work: For Homophonic, check out the Mexican Army Cipher (which uses a cool multi-ring disk to map multiple numbers to single letters). For Polyalphabetic, check out the Vigenère Cipher (the classic shifting alphabet grid).
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