Puzzle Lab
Pick a puzzle type to drill. Each one is the same kind of puzzle the escape rooms are built from — a hint appears whenever you get stuck.
Where this idea comes from
The cipher wheel
The Roman writer Suetonius says Julius Caesar wrote private letters with each letter moved three places along the alphabet. Around 1467 the Italian architect Leon Battista Alberti described a cipher disk — two rings of letters, the inner one turning — in a short book, De componendis cifris.
One thing to hold: Two discs of card or metal, one inside the other, pinned through the middle.
Why it matters: Alberti turned his disk part-way through a message, so one letter could be written many different ways. That idea shaped secret writing for the next 400 years.
What we don’t know: None of Caesar’s own coded letters survive; we know of his shift only because Suetonius wrote it down, about 150 years later.
Counting letters (frequency analysis)
The scholar al-Kindi, working in Baghdad in the 800s, wrote the oldest known description of breaking a code by counting how often each letter turns up, in a book now called A Manuscript on Deciphering Cryptographic Messages.
One thing to hold: A tally: one mark for every time a letter appears.
Why it matters: A code that swaps letters hides each letter but not how often it is used. In English, E is the commonest, so the commonest letter in a long coded message is a good first guess for E.
What we don’t know: His book was lost for a long time; a copy was found in 1987 in the Süleymaniye Library in Istanbul. Exactly when in the 800s he wrote it is not known.