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TL;DRProblem Bodytl;drAuthorTom Bytheway (tb403) DescriptionThe linked file is a big block of seemingly random capital letters. It looks suspiciously like some find of ciphertext. If we count the letters (maybe using a computer to help) we find that the most frequent letter is V followed by C, whereas the most common letters in English are E then T. We could keep doing this with further letters matching them to their expected values, or take a guess at the type of cipher. It is an Affine cipher, and from just the first two mappings we can deduce that the formula is 17x + 21. We find the text is taken from Edgar Allan Poe's The Gold-Bug, except that the words "And the solution was pentagonal" have been added to the end. Pentagonal is in fact the solution Solutionpentagonal Correct submissions
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