D R I N K D E L I C I O U S C O C A C O L A F O R T H A T C O O L R E F R E S H I N G T A S T E
Yes. I’m not a cryptographer. I spent forever trying to figure out why ABSCISSA. My spelling sucks and both of my subscribers ditched my blog months ago. K2 gave me a mental workout: How the heel are we supposed to get ABSCISSA? Eventually, by dicking around with rumkin, isolating that CT repetition, and plugging in nonsense from the morse, the code word popped out. If BERLIN = NYPVTT= 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, one for one, that TT double cuts our possible alphabets from 26 to 1 for those two characters: they’re in the same column or row. Through trial and error, I realized one must be backwards, either CT or Tabula. This is how: T is not “just a letter”, it is part of the codeword- the fifth position in each row and column, mod 26 counting by K’s. I and N are 4 letters apart in that alphabet, and neither are in the code word. It’s 11 letters from I to T and 15 from L, going the other way it’s 11 again, around the bend, back to T, and 15 for I going the other way. To make it make sense, you can’t go the “long way around the alphabet” and stay on the same row or column and pull those letters from the tabula intercepts because they still have to be 4 apart in the other register. There are no sequential doubles in the tabula in either direction. So instead of going the long way around, if we just count the other direction, we have a scenario that is at least plausible. Just sayin. And I checked to see if I could work it both ways as an OTP, but ultimately, I created the whole thing out of those two letters as a logical exercise. I came away from it wanting to do more research about running keys and double playfairs. As you point out, it is really just an artifact of the alphabet key, but even in yours, the ZZ in position 4 and 5 of your codetext, and the T in SparTacus in position 5, illustrates my point. The intercept of T and Z is G. The Plaintext for the other Z next to it, has to be keyed by a CT that is exactly as far from G as this unknown CT letter is from T using that column or row’s alphabet.
I accept your criticism, and I appreciate your collegial tone and good humor. I think over at CIA, comments that attack others’ motives rather than addressing the merit of their ideas falls into the category of triplex division of the word ASSUME. Not everybody gets that clue.