The untold story of the Man of Marseilles is here.

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Alright, so I messed around with this “man of marseilles” thing today. Here’s how it went down.

The untold story of the Man of Marseilles is here.

First off, I saw it mentioned somewhere – can’t remember exactly where, probably some forum or something. Sounded interesting, something about encoding or decoding… I’m always up for a challenge.

So, I started digging around. Found some online resources explaining the basic concept. Essentially, it’s a way to turn a message into a series of numbers, and then back again. Kinda like a simple cipher. I wasn’t aiming for crazy top security, I just wanted to see how it worked.

I decided to start with a really simple example. Just the word “HELLO”. I grabbed a piece of paper and started assigning numbers to each letter, based on the alphabet. A=1, B=2, you get the idea. So, “HELLO” became 8-5-12-12-15.

Next, I needed to encode it using the “man of marseilles” method. This involves adding a “key” number to each of the original numbers. I chose a key of 7, just randomly. So, 8+7=15, 5+7=12, 12+7=19, 12+7=19, 15+7=22. My encoded message was now 15-12-19-19-22.

Then, to make it a bit harder to crack, I decided to add a checksum. This is just a number calculated from the encoded message. I added all the encoded numbers together: 15+12+19+19+22 = 87. Then I divided by the number of digits in the encoded message (5) and kept the remainder: 87 % 5 = 2. This ‘2’ became my checksum.

The untold story of the Man of Marseilles is here.

So, the final message, ready to be sent off to someone (or just stored for later) was: 15-12-19-19-22-2.

Now for the fun part: decoding! I wrote down the encoded message: 15-12-19-19-22-2. First, I needed to verify the checksum. I added up the first five numbers again: 15+12+19+19+22 = 87. Then I did the modulo operation: 87 % 5 = 2. The result matched the checksum in the message, so I knew the message hadn’t been corrupted.

Next, I had to reverse the encoding. Remember that key of 7 I used? I subtracted 7 from each of the encoded numbers: 15-7=8, 12-7=5, 19-7=12, 19-7=12, 22-7=15. This gave me 8-5-12-12-15.

Finally, I converted these numbers back into letters, using the same A=1, B=2 system. 8=H, 5=E, 12=L, 12=L, 15=O. And there it was: HELLO!

Success! It actually worked. It’s a really simple method, but it was kinda cool to see it in action.

The untold story of the Man of Marseilles is here.
  • What I learned: The basic principles of simple encoding and decoding.
  • What I’d do differently next time: Try a more complex key generation method, or maybe even use a different checksum algorithm.

Anyway, that’s my “man of marseilles” adventure for today. Pretty basic, but a fun little project.

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