A priori or A posteriori cracking?

[obelus]

In The Story of Decipherment, Pope cites the case of pragmatic Japanese medical students who deciphered a forbidden Dutch textbook in 1775.  They were motivated specifically by the anatomical illustrations, but "they none of them knew the values of the European letters or how they operated."  It was accomplished through general ingenuity, including scraps of a priori knowledge, rather than formal cryptanalysis.  In his translated memoir, Gempaku Sugita states that "we translated by conjecture."

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