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?

I don't want to give too much away, but I'll say two things here. One, YES, the fact that there are no 9s is hugely, vitally relevant to cracking the code. Two, there's been some speculation on what it means that no triplet begins with 1. Quite honestly, I hadn't noticed that myself and it's sheer fluke that it's turned out that way, just an unexpected effect of the choice of cities. Encoding my own name JENNIFER TURNER provides two triplets starting with 1; in the wild I would actually expect triplets to begin with 1 with higher than average likelihood.  

Posted by Jenny Turner on 2004-11-10 04:17:13