The Ciphergram Solution Assistant ( CSA) ignores punctuation by treating it as white space, except for the apostrophe. This means that if a word is split by a hyphen (or any other character not a letter), it will be treated as two words. It may help to retype a hyphenated word as one word without the hyphen. It may also help to leave out some of the words, at least to start with.

The CSA assumes that the ONLY one-letter words are A and I. So, if the attribution has initials, as in N. F. XYYHNYV, including the attribution in the ciphergram would make any solution impossible unless the N and F just happen to represent A and I.

You should leave the Initial Key window (the third from the top) empty at first. If you have trouble getting a solution, you can enter your guesses for ciphertext to plaintext mapping. If the Initial Key window is not empty, it should contain a letter pair or pairs, with the pairs separated with a space. For example, suppose you want the CSA to translate cipher b to plain h and cipher f to plain l. You would enter bh fl in the Initial Key, and then click the Solve button.

With the above in mind, it sometimes helps to include the attribution (without initials) in the ciphergram window as well as in the attribution window, but usually it does not, because authors' names are not likely to be in the CSA's word list.

You may be able to get a solution to a hard problem by leaving out some of the words, especially the very short ones, from the ciphergram (the top window), and putting them in the attribution. The CSA derives its key only from the ciphergram, but it uses the derived key to translate the content of attribution as well as the ciphergram. Therefore, if you use this strategy, the results may show partially filled in words that might give you a hint.

Last updated 2002 September 17