On Cryptograms

I love puzzles.

Any type of puzzles, really. I love Word Searches, Fill-ins, Sudoku (technically Dell's Number Sums), and especially cryptograms.

It's one of the few things my Mom got me into while growing up. She got me into doing word searches, and I slowly graduated into doing Fill-ins and other word games. But it was when I was in High School I finally realized how to solve the elusive cryptoquiz/cryptogram.

Cryptoquizzes are easy (at least now they are - back then it was a triumph for me to solve them), It's usually a list of words (usually 10-12) that are encrypted. And all the words have a common theme. Like "Oscar Winning Movies" or "Frozen Foods". Since the words all have a common theme, it's easy to spot patterns in the words and solve the quiz.

The cryptogram, on the other hand, is a bit tougher. Normally it's a standard substitution cypher, where one letter is substituted for another (T is replaced with J, etc.). But the challenge is finding word and sentence patterns within what looks like nonsense. For example, if I see the cypher - DJKD DJU - I'm 99% positice that the real message is THAT THE. You can see the DJ combination at the beginning of both words and follow the logic from there. Or noticing that if the quote ends in a question mark, I can be sure that the first word is usually WHO, WHAT, or WHY.

And I really believe that growing up with all these puzzles that have challenged my brains over the years have helped me throughout my jobs, especially here at the bank. Seeing the patterns of numbers, looking for logic behind outages, and just letting the logical portion of my brain take over when something has gone wrong.

And to top it all off, I can get Daily Cryptograms and Cryptoquizzes in my RSS feed on a daily basis. Much easier than buying a book and forgetting to bring it in to do at work :)