Decoder -- Cypher Solving Helper

I recently got a puzzle book that has lots of cypher puzzles. So I naturally thought that it would be nice to have a little computer program to help in solving the puzzles. I present here the resulting program, Decoder. Writing this program was simplified because I no longer had to do an Applet version. You now have to download the Java executable to play. Source code is provided if you want it. And it is all absolutely free.

Download Java executable (JAR file) here (15k).

Download the source code with Netbeans project files here (38k).

Heres a quick rundown of how it works:

Enter Encrypted Text

First enter the encrypted text in lowercase. You can also enter punctuation, which is assumed to be plaintext.

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Then press the Process button. playing field

The table on the right shows the number of occurrences of each of the letters in the encrypted text. You will have to assign each letter to what it should be in the plaintext output. Sorry, this isn't "Lazyman Decoder".

Assign plaintext equivalent characters

Based on the expected frequency of letter occurrences and common sense (in this case, the letter "z" is probably the letter/word "a") and knowledge of English words start filling in guesses. playing field

Eventually you should reach the correct result with the translation making sense.

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