Science Weird cryptography problem

[Jarvitä]

This is a challenge/homework for my boolean algebra class, posting here just in case anyone has a better idea of how to start decrypting it. The original message, and the result, should be clear text, and the image is a graphical representation of an arbitrarily assigned two-dimensional array, and that's all the hints.

Attached image is the cryptogram.

 

[Urwumpe]

Well, just as brain dump:

I see the image is made of 30 gray-scale cells. Let's assume, the intensity of each cell represents a letter. The first I would then do, is a histogram of the intensities, for finding out direct relations. If this fails, I would have to assume rotating keys.

 

[Jarvitä]

The assignment says it's entirely human-solvable, so no key encryption. Besides, not a bad idea. And, by the way, it looks like 35 cells to me (7*5 grid).

Here's the value of the cells at 0 for black and 100 for white (the "value" variable in the HSV model), read left to right, top to bottom:

12,04,27,17,64,17,23,
64,16,8,18,10,06,12,
21,8,27,14,64,6,23,
7,6,64,6,23,7,6,
64,0,13,27,13,17,27

Binary, hex and ASCII conversions aren't making any sense. Any other ideas?

 

[Urwumpe]

The assignment says it's entirely human-solvable, so no key encryption. Besides, not a bad idea. And, by the way, it looks like 35 cells to me (7*5 grid).

Here's the value of the cells at 0 for black and 100 for white (the "value" variable in the HSV model), read left to right, top to bottom:

12,04,27,17,64,17,23,
64,16,8,18,10,06,12,
21,8,27,14,64,6,23,
7,6,64,6,23,7,6,
64,0,13,27,13,17,27

Binary, hex and ASCII conversions aren't making any sense. Any other ideas?

It is 0 to 64, but I notice, that the 64 is far out, otherwise it is just 0 to 27.

Which means to me, that you could map 0 to 27 on the alphabet. The English alphabet only has 0 to 25, so you have extra letters. 64 seems to be a delimiter. Now, 26, 27 and 64 could also be control signs. As it is about boolean operations, maybe you need to do a bitwise boolean operation with the symbols or the control signs tell you how to read the matrix (virtual ant like)

 

[Jarvitä]

Bah, it was really simple. As you said, each cell represents a character. So I solved it with basic character frequency analysis. It's a short message in Serbian that amounts to "This cryptogram is a simple test".

And 64 is a space.

 

[Fizyk]

Also, 64 may be space, and 0-27 may be letters, but not in English. Seeing that Jarvitä is from Serbia, maybe it's in Serbian. I don't know, how many letters are there in Serbian, but 28 seems like a reasonable amount.

EDIT: Hah, Jarvitä was quicker, but essentially I was right