2.1, 2.2, 2.4, Due on September 7

The Challenging

From just reading section 2.2, my understanding of how to decode affine messages is pretty cloudy. I think I could really benefit from seeing the "Known plaintext" method done in class, because it seems to make sense in theory, but I don't know if I really understand everything that is going on there. I didn't understand why there were two corresponding values of beta and why of the two key candidates, only one of them was possible. 

The Interesting

I like that these sections talked about using frequency counts to determine what the cipher texts read, because I tried using frequency counts on the first day of class to decode the message handed out to us. I didn't realize that frequency counting was considered one of the longer methods.