A Cipher Thought Experiment

[oshfdk]

I see. There is a clever use of a binary state, alternating between copy mode and a simple letter substitution mode, that resets to copy mode at each word start and after "/", and switches to the simple substitution mode after any bigram substitution.

Also some typos, for example:

KLRO/SSNO/KLOR (clessical) should be KLRLO/SSNO/KLOR (classical)
MT/ORNO/K (thoric) should be LT/ORNO/K (doric)
NO/ONRO/K (ionec) should be NO/ONRNO/K (ionic)

Claude AI was struggling with these too, because I was asking it to write code to decode the ciphertext instead of letting it decode it directly. But I sort of cheated in the end, after identifying about 80% of the plaintext letters, I just switched to ChatGPT and asked it "to restore this partially scrambled text" and this is how I got the final results. This last part I could also do by hand, because it's quite easy to reKonstruKt an EnglNOsh tMOxt wNOth 20% of lMOttMOrs mNOssNOng. 

I have to say the AI was especially helpful in the beginning where I had to run all experiments for three potential plaintext languages. I basically told it to run various statistics for prefixes/suffixes and repeated substrings and try to interpret them separately for each of English, Latin and Ancient Greek. I think if manually decoding this would have been the most tedious part, which would take a whole day at the very least, even for someone familiar with all three languages, instead of 40-50 minutes (of which I actually was engaged for maybe 15 minutes, just working on other things for the rest of the time, waiting for Claude to complete each task).