What is a hobby you enjoy, but seems too quirky or obscure to bring up in most conversations?
What is a hobby you enjoy, but seems too quirky or obscure to bring up in most conversations?
Mine would be creating pen and paper ciphers for my made up secret communication needs.
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Yeah I'm going to need to know more about your hobby.
I've done research on ciphers and cryptography a little bit, so based on my understanding I made up some operations you can do on paper (not needing a computer) to transform text into something seemingly random, but also it has to be reversible with a key. I try to make it so that it doesn't fall into the common traps that some older ciphers fell into like double letters are the same like with simple substitution ciphers. Also I wanted it to be reusable unlike with a one-time pad, in my case I like when the key is hidden in the encrypted message.
I haven't found anyone to test out any ciphers yet, but I also haven't looked too hard. I'm sure some people enjoy deciphering for fun (I don't have the smarts or at least the time for that).
Enigma comes to mind, but probably too complex to use like that, but the idea behind it is interesting maybe a simpler version could do it?
And to break it you can build a Turing Bomb!
ha yeah. I don't do anything that complex, but I suppose I could just drop everything and dedicate my life to it now and I might get 1/10th of the way there