Breaking Substitution Ciphers with Markov Chains

What it does

In this post we will discuss a method for quickly solving seemingly intractable search problems called the Metrolopis algorithm . This is one of the most popular algorithms in applied science and engineering – its use cases include optimizing the layout of circuit elements on a chip, finding a region of the genome that causes a specific disease and Google’s PageRank algorithm. We’ll demonstrate the method via a neat application to encryption which is due to Persi Diaconis . We will then try to understand why the method works and see that it can be explained using the beautiful theory of Markov chains . A substitution cipher is a simple type of encryption in which each letter in the message…from daniellowengrub.com

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