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Wilkins cipher

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This is an intermediate page for the Wilkins cipher.

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Any messages enciphered using this method would have to be quite brief: as evidenced by events in Quicksilver, the very length of the ciphertext needed to encode a long message would arouse suspicion.

It is a clever cipher, although Leibniz's enhancement doesn't seem to strengthen it much. If I understand the process correctly, here's why:

If the ciphertext is written out in binary notation without applying the I Ching key, it is likely that you'd end up with some numbers higher than 26 (011010). Assuming that the letter "Z" was used in the plaintext, you could then find the difference between the highest ciphertext number and 26, and subtract that from each ciphertext number. If your results still don't make sense, you can work backwards using "Y" and 25, "X" and 24, etc.

Still, it's an interesting cipher, and a difficult one to detect if executed well.

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