To facilitate statistical comparison, the encrypted texts should be quite long, although the objective of the project is to decode only the first sentence. The cumbersome task of counting the characters is automated by the online character counter . The character counter works best with texts in electronic formats that can be copied and pasted into the WWW-based input form. The output of the program is a printable table of the frequencies of characters, including punctuation marks and other printable characters in the text. Comparing the proportions of characters is only a good starting point.
Students quickly discover the meaning of a couple of the characters in the cipher.
Typically the direct comparison method breaks down at this point and should be stopped because other characters cannot be reliably matched solely on the basis of their frequencies. Statistics helps to choose among the alternatives when a word can be decoded in more than one way. Similarly, three-character combinations can be inspected. Every newly deciphered word increases the number of deciphered characters in the encoded text and serves as an extra verification, or falsification, of the previously established matches. Experiences With the Decoding Project 11 This project was used in Elementary Probability and Statistics at the University of Cincinnati.