Thursday, June 17, 2010

Dspeech - On the Fly Cypher Machine

A few years back, I had drank a lot of coffee and envisioned a way to make a "language" using a pretty simple find and replace machine.

Basically it would have a dictionary of English words and their translation and go through a text document and replace all the words with their new equivalent.

Ok, I know some of my friends know multiple languages and may be sort of passionate about this sort of thing. We both know this isn't an actual language. Hence language in quotes at the very start.

The coolest thing was that when it stumbled across an undefined word, you made it up on the spot and added it in to the language. Slowly a vocabulary would build and you'd have something.

At the time, I couldn't quite get it to work. A few months ago, I wrote the entire thing from scratch in about 15-20 minutes.

The source code can be downloaded here

Now, I don't know what use you'll have for this.

I personally use it to make a fake language to throw at the people in my D&D game. Basically they find script written in what I call "Dark Speech". This provides a solid way to write stuff in English, and make it impossible to read, yet possible to decode.

You could use it to send secret messages to your friends, but you'd both need a current copy of the dictionary for that to work. Then you'll hit issues with concurrency.

Anyway, maybe someone in the whole of the Internet can put it to use.

Also my second piece of beer-ware - still no beer, but maybe one day.

-Liam

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