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Viewpoint News, Fall 2007

Code Challenge

Want to win a $50 gift certificate? Take the Viewpoint Systems LabVIEW Code Challenge. This issue’s challenge is:

Write a substitution cipher encoder and decoder.

A substitution cipher uses a rearranged alphabet to translate one letter to another. The rearrangement method can vary from a simple cyclic shift (left or right) to a random scrambling. The idea is to use the input plaintext letter as a lookup into the rearranged alphabet. For example, suppose the rearranged alphabet was DTREZFI… (with only the first few letters being shown here). Then the plaintext word “BEE” would be translated to “TZZ”, since B is the second letter of the usual alphabet and T is in the second position of the rearranged alphabet, and E is the fifth letter with Z in the fifth position, and so on.

The challenge is to write a VI that takes as inputs the plaintext and the substitution alphabet and produces the ciphertext as output. The winner will be the one with the fastest conversion time.

Please submit your solution (via email) as a ZIP file (with no password, please).