Crack the Coded Message: A O O L I W M U V T E E S E S Y O D

Julius Caesar was one of the first people to write in code. He invented the Caesar cipher, in which each letter is replaced with another letter that’s a fixed number of positions down the alphabet. The following cipher is not the Caesar cipher, but rather what cryptographers call a “columnar transposition cipher” or “Caesar’s Box” though it is unclear if the code was ever actually used by Caesar.

To decode the Caesar’s box you can follow these steps;

1) Count the number of characters in the code. Here we have 18: A O O L I W M U V T E E S E S Y O D

2) Determine how many rows you can divide the letters into equally (Find the square root of the number you found in step 1. If the square root isn’t a whole number, round up). We can put 16 into 4 rows of 4 (I.e. the square root of 16 is 4). If we had 25 letters we could put them into 5 rows of 5 (square root of 25 is 5) and so on. In cases where the number doesn’t divide so neatly, use the number of rows for the next “boxable” (perfect square) number up. The “boxable” (square) numbers are 9, 16, 25, 36, 49, etc. If the code has 22 letters (square root of 22 is 4.69), the next number up is 25, which would mean 5 rows (4.69 rounds up to 5).

3) Write the letters out into rows. With the example given, it’d be written out as such:

A O O L I
W M U V T
E E S E
S Y O D

4) Start from the top left letter and read down, then start at the top of the next column and read down again, and so on. This example has the message: “Awesome You Solved it”

So Similarly for 2 as per the steps discussed we can write;

C K H D G R E E E H A D C R T C T O I as;

C K H D G
R E E E H
A D C R T
C T O I

and the answer is: “Cracked the code right”