Seven Kings High
School
Presents
Codes
First we looked at the different Ciphers
The Pig Pen Code
The Caesar Shift
The Morse Code
The Semaphore on the Hill
Binary Codes
Number Plates
100 Grid
Coordinates
We worked out the answers
to the Jokes
&
then
We worked out the clues to try to find the
Enigmatic Character. We found:-
The Enigmatic Character was a very clever man
indeed he studied a lot of subjects including
Mathematics.
He was a mathematician
He was a philosopher
He spoke Arabic
He had something to do with the House of Wisdom
The letters K & G
We searched the Internet and think that
the character could be :-
Omar Khayyam
Born: 18 May 1048 in Nishapur, Persia (now Iran)
Died: 4 Dec 1131 in Nishapur, Persia (now Iran)
Omar Khayyam's full name was Ghiyath al-Din Abu'l-Fath
Umar ibn Ibrahim Al-Nisaburi al-Khayyami. A literal
translation of the name al-Khayyami (or al-Khayyam) means
'tent maker' and this may have been the trade of Ibrahim his
father.
We made up some coded messages of our own.
We used
the Binary Code
The Pig Pen Codes
A Coordinate Grid
Can you crack
this binary
code ?
30 25 20 31 25 11 31
30 38 5 25 31
20 11 25 10 38 11 23 18 35
WHAT DO PARROTS LIKE TO WATCH ON TV?
HOW DO SAILORS GET FROM ONE SHIP TO ANOTHER?
WHAT NEVER GOES UP BUT STILL COMES DOWN?
Using the coordinate grid
10 a n t l j r m m j z
9 k j f u z w u u g s
8 i s n j u t w v s i
7 g a n g p r z s t t
6 j u f f k w n q e h
5 x j k n e d s i a e
4 r o m q h s e h n d
3 a y t w u d o e u i
2 i f k e a d g n o h
1 q g h r y q h u l n
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Can you read this message ?
(3 , 4) (5 , 2) (6 , 8) (10 , 6) (7 , 5)
(1 , 6) (2 , 8)
(3 , 6) (8 , 9) (10 , 1)
We decoded the four messages.
All four were coded using the Caesar Shift.
The second and third code changed the shift part way
through the message.
It was more difficult when the letters were close
together but we looked for the three letter words that
could be ‘the’ or ‘and’ to help us find the shift.
Each message told us about Julius Caesar.
We decided to look at the frequency of the letters in a
number of different passages. We looked at a passage
from:
An English reading book.
The Daily Mirror
The Guardian
Two French reading books.
We did a tally chart for the letters in each
passage.
We put our results onto a spread sheet and
used excel to work out the frequency for each
letter as a percentage of the total number of
letters.
We made a bar chart for each set of data.
Here are our graphs.
We took a passage from the book ‘Captain Underpants’
A Bar Chart to show the frequency of the letters
25.0
20.0
Frequency
15.0
10.0
5.0
0.0 AB C D E FG H I J K LM N O PQ R S TU VWXYZ
The most frequent letter is T and then E & H
We took and article from the Daily Mirror
Bar to show the frequencies of the letters.
16.0
14.0
12.0
Freqency %
10.0
8.0
6.0
4.0
2.0
0.0
A B C D E F GH I J K L MNOPQ R S T U V WXYZ
We found that E was the most frequent letter and then R & T
We took a passage from the Guardian.
A Bar Chart to show the frequency of the Letters
15.0
Frequency %
10.0
5.0
0.0
A B C D E F G H I J K LM NO P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
The most frequent letter was E & then A
We took a passage from a French book.
A Bar Chart to show the frequencies of the letters.
Frequency %
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V WX Y Z
E was the most frequent letter A, I, N, R, S, T & U were
about the same.
We took a passage from a second French book.
A Bar Chart to show the Frequency of the letters
10
8
Frequency %
6
4
2
0
A B CD E FH I J KL MNOP Q R S T UVWXYZ
E & K were the most frequent letters and then F, N & V
The results of our investigation into the
frequency of the letters.
We found that the letter E was the most
frequent letter for all of the passages except
Captain Underpants. In this passage T was the
most frequent letter.
We thought this was strange so we looked at
the passage again.
T appeared the most in the ‘Captain
Underpants’ paragraph because the
names of the characters have T in them.
E, we found that
After
A & T occurred quite often.
We could now use our results to try to crack a coded
message.
We would need to work out the frequencies for the
coded message and compare them with the
frequencies that we found from our investigation.
If the letter Z came up most often this would most
likely be E.
We could then compare the other most frequent
letters.