Code Breaker Trivia Quiz

Answer: Achievement

15 digits encode 11 letters - so each digit is just less than one and a half letters? Not quite - it's just A=1, B=2, C=3 and so on to Z=26. You need to sometimes try several assignments - the initial 13 could be an M as well or the 22513 could be BYM, BBEAC or several other combinations.

1 3 8 9 5 22 5 13 5 14 20 = ACHIEVEMENT.

Answer: Squares

This also uses the A=1 to Z=26 assignments, but it squares each of the numbers before concatenating them into a long string.

361 289 441 1 324 25 361 = SQUARES.

Answer: Physics

This code is what we have as ChemSpell, but made harder by the fact that it uses the atomic numbers instead of the element names.

15 1 39 14 6 16 = Phosphorus Hydrogen Yttrium Silicon Carbon Sulphur = PHYSICS.

Answer: Dual Carriageway

This could be called a scramble, but it has a strict pattern. To decode it, you need to start at both ends, alternating until you meet in the middle. I made it easy by actually starting on the left, some users of this code begin on the right for extra confusion!

Writing this code without errors is rather easy: Type two letters, hit "left" once, repeat until you are done. Then insert the spaces as per the original word lengths.

Answer: Binary Number

Internet riddles love to use this encoding which is based on the computer's internal ASCII encoding of letters. Each pair of symbols is a hexadecimal number. 20 is a space, values from 41 to 5A are capital letters and 61 to 7A are lowercase. Digits are in the 30 to 39 range.

42 69 6E 61 72 79 20 4E 75 6D 62 65 72 = Binary Number.

When you see a string of digits and A to F that seems to have a lot of 6s and 7s in a puzzle, always suspect ASCII.

Answer: Dinner

Users of not-so-smart mobile phones will probably fondly (or not so fondly) remember the days of thumbing out messages. With just eight numeric keys to represent the 26 letters, most of them required multiple keypresses and you had to make sure to insert the proper gaps when you needed two letters from the same key in succession.

3 4 66 66 33 777 is the sequence for DINNER. Without the number repetitions, this is also used for classic phone spelling: 1-800-4DINNER is the number 1-800-4346637.

(Note that the "Phoning:" quizzes on FunTrivia use a different matching between letters and digits than real-world phone spelling does.)

Answer: Mind the Gap

Using a code pad such as a book, both partners of a dialog have access to what makes for a very secure cipher. A typical encoding is page, paragraph, line, word but for the quiz I wanted to use a very obvious book, so I used the Bible (KJV) and just indicated the word within the verse.

Genesis 26:35 "Which were a grief of MIND unto Isaac and to Rebekah."
Revelation 5:1 "And I saw in THE right hand of him that sat on the throne a book written within and on the backside, sealed with seven seals."
Ezekiel 22:30 "And I sought for a man among them, that should make up the hedge, and stand in the GAP before me for the land, that I should not destroy it: but I found none."

(The latter is actually the only mention of "gap" in singular in the entire Bible.)

Answer: Radio

If you find some seemingly meaningless text of only short words with weird, arbitrary capitalization in a puzzle, you should immediately think of Morse code. Almost always, capital letters mean the "bigger" dashes, so the above translates to

.-. .- -.. .. --- = RADIO.

Answer: mix dirty dice

A lot of zeroes and fives is a bit of a pointer towards this nasty encoding. It uses the A=1, B=2... pattern except when the letters form a Roman number in which case that one's translated (usually liberally, allowing combos such as IC as 99 and sometimes even LM as 950). Solving this code may require quite some backtracking.

Here we have (Roman numbers in caps): MIX DI r t y DIC e. (VICE works for the last word too)

Needless to say, puzzle builders will go great lengths to include lots of Vs, Xs and Cs in their texts when using this.

Answer: Congratulations

This code is so easy it often gets overlooked in favor of more difficult ideas including cryptograms. All you need to do is to insert some line breaks and then read the letters column by column:

CGTAO
ORUTN
NALIS

reads as CON-GRA-TUL-ATI-ONS.