# Polarizing Encryption: What does it say?

Below is a short paragraph. How would you decrypt this?

///_/\\_/\//_\__/|_//|///\\//\_|/\\|_\__\/_//|_\/\||
/|\|/\|\_\__/\/\/\||/|\__\__/\\\/|///\|//|__/\///\/_
_\__/\_\/\_//\_|/\\|_\__/|_//\|\/\/__\__/\/\/\||/|_\
/|/_/\\__\__/\||/|/\/\///|_\_\__/|/_/\\_/\//_\__/\|_
/\_//|\\/|\/_\__/\/_/\||/\/|_\___|_/_\___|_\_\___|_|
_\___|/__\___|//_\___|/\_\___|/|_\___|\__\___|\/_\__
_|_/_|___\__/|/_/\\//\|//\///|_|_\___\__/_\_/\///\|_
/\|_/\||_\__///|/\||/|_\/\|_/\/__\___\___\___\___\__

• You should edit the question to include the correct paragraph as you mentioned that you made some mistakes – Anthony Pham Nov 8 '17 at 5:00

I get

The quick Ðro{n fox jumped back qnd forth over the lazy dog 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 times Hello World

I found this by seeing that there are 4 symbols in this code, each probably encoding 2 bit. Using 8 bit per character, one sees that the end of your code contains the same sequence multiple times, for me it was clear that this must be whitespace. The only whitespace letter matching this (in ASCII) order of 2-bit blocks is space. From this one gets that _ must be 00 and \ is 10. Further one sees that most of the caracters start with /, hence it is 01 in order to obtain letters. So | must be the fourth possibility: 11.

With this,

the 4-character blocks translate to one ASCII letter each, namely
///_ T 01010100
/\\_ h 01101000
/\// e 01100101
/|_/ q 01110001
/|// u 01110101
/\\/ i 01101001
/\_| c 01100011
/\\| k 01101011
\/_/ Ð 11010001
/|_\ r 01110010
/\|| o 01101111
/|\| { 01111011
/\|\ n 01101110
/\/\ f 01100110
/|\_ x 01111000
/\\\ j 01101010
/\|/ m 01101101
/|__ p 01110000
/\/_ d 01100100
/\_\ b 01100010
/\_/ a 01100001
/|/_ t 01110100
/|/\ v 01110110
/\|_ l 01101100
/|\\ z 01111010
/|\/ y 01111001
/\/| g 01100111
_|_/ 1 00110001
_|_\ 2 00110010
_|_| 3 00110011
_|/_ 4 00110100
_|// 5 00110101
_|/\ 6 00110110
_|/| 7 00110111
_|\_ 8 00111000
_|\/ 9 00111001
_|__ 0 00110000
/|_| s 01110011
/_\_ H 01001000
///| W 01010111

• Superb! Looks like I messed up on a few characters. I should have made a script to encrypt it instead of doing it by hand. – RogueVeggie Nov 8 '17 at 2:21
• @RogueVeggie I think it's fine with the spelling mistakes. Like this it is not possible to guess missing letters, because you could overlook one or more characters that are not usual. And also it's kind of 1337speak: With some fantasy Ð looks like B, { like a w rotated by 90°, and q like a. – A. P. Nov 8 '17 at 7:57
• Agreed. Happy accident – RogueVeggie Nov 8 '17 at 8:00