In the English fairy tale, Jack and the beanstalk, Jack is a young, poor boy living with his mother and a dairy cow on a farm cottage. The cow’s milk is their only source of income. When the cow stops…
Visual cryptography is a technique that consists of hiding information (text/symbols/graphics) within two semi-transparent pictures (called layers). Overlaying both pictures exactly on top of one another, will reveal the hidden information. Using this technique, it is impossible to retrieve any…
Count-controlled loops are used in many programs to increment a counter for each iteration of the loop. Per default the increment for the counter is +1. FOR counter FROM 1 TO 10: OUTPUT (COUNTER) However you can specify a different…
The Atbash Cipher is a monoalphabetic substitution cipher that was originally used for the Hebrew alphabet. It is one of the earliest known subtitution ciphers to have been used. As opposed to a Caesar Cipher, the Atbash cipher does not…
In this blog post we will investigate two types of coordinates used to identify the location of a point on a 2D plan: Cartesian Coordinates (x,y) Polar Coordinates (r,θ) Both sets of coordinates have their own applications and are often…
The MRX20 probe was sent to Mars by the Inter-Continental Space Agency (ICSA) a few years ago. It was due to return to planet Earth just a few days ago. The probe collected a large amount of samples from the…
A Caesar Shift cipher is a type of mono-alphabetic substitution cipher where each letter of the plain text is shifted a fixed number of places down the alphabet. For example, with a shift of 1, letter A would be replaced…
Dobble (Spot It! in the US) is a speedy observation card game for 2 players or more. During the game, players have to spot the identical symbol between two cards as quickly as possible to collect cards and score points.…
When calculating the distance between two points on a 2D plan/map we often calculate or measure the distance using straight line between these two points. Thought this “as the crow flies” distance can be very accurate it is not always…
It’s only few days before Christmas so here are some secret messages from Santa for you to decode… Secret Message #1, encoded using Maritime Signal Flags International maritime signal flags are various flags used to communicate with ships. Each flag…