Caesar Cypher & The Substitutions have been on tour, and as tradition dictates, the souvenir tour T-shirt bears a list of the cities visited on the back. But of course, since we're talking about one of Europe's leading cryptographic jazz combos, the list is in code:

080476
410488
631428083607
735616461
440401478
235476731
540631
616431
461546410

The list contains no information apart from the city names. Can you work out their itinerary?

(In reply to Hints and stuff by Jenny Turner)

Below is a list of European capitals. However, none seems to bear any meaningful relationship to any of the codewords. The codewords in fact seem not to fit any model of uniformity -- they only lack properties rather than possessing them.  They lack 9, they lack 1 as the start of a 3-digit group.  Their lengths are multiples of 3, but if it is 3 numbers per letter then there are a lot of 2-letter cities which would have to be abbreviations then it would seem.  On the other hand, if the cities have the normal number of letters, then they can be only 9 letters corresponding to the single digits 0-8.  Two digits per letter is ruled out because some codewords have odd length. The question of whether or not the cities are European remains wide open. Your hints and tips do not seem to help me resolve any of these dilemmas. I don't see how the codewords relate even remotely to the cities below if they are spelled out in English. What seems likely then is that they are not in English, really, but, as suggested in a previous comment, rendered as spoken English in a phonetic alphabet encoded into 3-digit octal code letters. Chinese spelling also comes to mind, but 3-digit octal does not seem adequate for Chinese characters.

Denmark Copenhagen
Norway Oslo
Sweden Stockholm
Finland Helsinki
Germany Berlin
England London
Eire Dublin
Holland Amsterdam
France Paris
Belgium Brussels
Spain Madrid
Switzerland Bern
Itally Rome
Greece Athens
Albania Tinrane
Poland Warzaw
Czech Republic Praque
Hungary Budapest
Russia Moscow
Austria Vienna
Bosnia and Herzegovina Sarajevo
Estonia Tallinn
Iceland Reykjavik
Liechtenstein Vaduz
Lithuania Vilnius
Luxembourg Luxembourg
Portugal Lisbon
Romania Bucharest
Slovakia Bratislava
Slovenia Ljubljana
Turkey Ankara
Ukraine Kiev
Latvia Riga
Belarus Minsk

Edited on November 9, 2004, 10:11 pm

Posted by Richard on 2004-11-09 14:01:16