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I have developed a code, this time purely a conversion from letters to numbers. I have put a table below with 3 words or phrases and their corresponding codes. Your job is to write my username in the code (a space is still a space in the code, and this is not case-sensitive).

Word/Phrase Code
absolutely 1406430645
chocolate 395462305
very smart 22705 203300

Bonus Question: Once you figured out how the code works and how to encode any word, can you figure out a method to decode any word?


Other puzzles in the series: No. 1

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1 Answer 1

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Cheese Cake is:

385695 3215
(Assuming the same encoding for upper and lower case letters)

Because:

The encoding is a positional sum of the A1Z26 encoding of the individual letters.

E.g. For absolutely we have:

 a    1
 b +   2
 s +   19
 o +    15
 l +     12
 u +      21
 t +       20
 e +         5
 l +         12
 y +          25
 ----------------
      1406430645
 

And for the bonus question:

No it is not possible to unambiguously decode any word, because multiple words can encode to the same number.
E.g. "He" and "go" both encode to 85. And so would "fy" if it were a valid word.
And as you add more letters/digits, the number of options increases.

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  • $\begingroup$ Nice, you got the correct answer! +1 $\endgroup$ Oct 4, 2022 at 7:22

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