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 think I got it.  It wasn't too hard, really.  If you haven't solved it yet, I suggest you try again, at least before looking at the thought process section.

1. brno
2. linz
3. salzburg
4. verona
5. milanq
6. genowa
7. pisa
8. roma
9. napoli

My geography is terrible, so I don't recognize 1, 2, 3, 6, and 9, but I assume the q after milan and the z after lin are just fillers.

My thought process (here come the real spoilers!):

Now, I hadn't followed this problem from the beginning, but after glancing at it, I noticed that each number had a multiple of three digits.  It wouldn't make sense to have 1 letter go to 3 digits, for a 2-letter city is unlikely.  Likewise, 3 letters couldn't go to 3 digits, for 0-9 isn't enough for a proper cryptography puzzle.  Therefore, two letters go to 3 digits.  3 base 9 digits is enough to encode exactly 2 letters.

So I converted the first two to base 3 and converted each group of 3 digits to a letter.  brno and linq confused me, so I went off in another direction for a while.  Later I tried number 3, and got salzburg.  Though I have never heard of it, it definitely sounds like the name of some city.  Then, I decrypted the rest.

Posted by Tristan on 2004-11-10 19:40:16