Nihilist cryptanalysis points
Agilus opened this issue · comments
Nihilist cryptanalysis points suggestion is coming in at sub-300. It's a bit new to us but I would be surprised if these are ever solvable in random aristocrat time (say, ~3 minutes for a pair of students like corresponding point value Aristocrats should be) or with guaranteed accuracy (Hill, Porta, Nihilist decode) as that score would suggest.
It's not actually far off from what's suggested in the Guidance.html, but it would help me to have that section fleshed out just a bit more. If the points want to stay below 300, are there guidelines for the crib/Polybius Key/keyword length that would make it solvable in a corresponding amount of time? The Guidance.html tells us that "cryptanalysis makes Nihilist ciphers significantly more difficult due to the iteration and deduction required to solve it", but if 100 points is the standard increase for recovering a K2 keyword, we are finding that cryptanalysis of a Nihilist requires both much more mental deduction and also more time than that. I think the issue is more that it's a hard task than that we are new at it.
Mostly, I'd like to see these get a point value that encourages students not to skip them because the investment is too high for the points.
Grateful for the work you've already put into the "how to solve" on these, though! The interactivity in the solver is neat.
@Agilus Check the latest version deployed to see if the scores are more in line with expectations (note that we still have to update the guidance page)
This is looking great, thank you. I think the only thing I'll add here for now is that I see a point bonus for keyword length not matching block size, which is also given if the block size is 0. We haven't done enough of these to tell, but my suspicion is that these will become easier if the block size is zero and may deserve a bit of a point reduction there instead of a bonus (for differing) or stagnant (for matching) value.
Updated and pushed to production.