yeah. gp (and I recommend everybody :) ) should probably try cracking a few substitution ciphers by hand just to see incredibly well frequency analysis really w

yeah. gp (and I recommend everybody :) ) should probably try cracking a few substitution ciphers by hand just to see incredibly well frequency analysis really works. like you say, a few dozen characters of ciphertext. and you don't even need the full frequency chart, either. just the top few is sufficient (there's a lot of noise as you go down anyway because of Zipf's law). add knowledge of the top-3 bigrams and trigrams, and you're all set. it's all due to the fact that Shannon discovered, that there's only roughly 1.5 bit of entropy per character in English text. and English is in fact one of the more efficient languages when it comes to this, Dutch or German have even less entropy per character :) I don't know how it compares to Spanish, however. gendered words are basically a type of redundancy checks, so they waste bits in that sense.