For your first blog assignment, write a post between 200 and 400 words that responds to the following question:

On page 15 of The Code Book, author Simon Singh writes, “Cryptanalysis could not be invented until a civilization had reached a sufficiently sophisticated level of scholarship in several disciplines, including mathematics, statistics, and linguistics.”  If such a level of scholarship was required for the development of the frequency analysis approach to solving substitution ciphers, what do you make of the fact that amateur cryptanalysts today often use that approach “on their own,” so to speak, without being trained in it?

Please give your post a descriptive title, and use the “Student Posts” category for your post. Also, give your post at least three tags, where each tag is a word or very short phrase (no more than three words) that describe the post’s content. You’re encouraged to use tags already in the system if they apply to your post.

Your post is due by 8:00 a.m. on Tuesday, September 4th. If you have any questions about sharing your first post here on the blog, don’t hesitate to ask.

Update: Here are some basic instructions for posting to WordPress that you might find useful. Also, via xkcd, here’s the secret to using any kind of computer technology.

Image: “Ghost Writer,” by me, Flickr (CC)