Indiana Jones, Substitution Ciphers, and Rewrite Rules

Help Indiana Jones escape the Temple of the Forbidden Eye through substitution ciphers and rewrite rules!

Today's blog will include a fun interactive Indiana Jones cipher game. From the previous blog series, Breaking the Enigma Code with Rewrite Rules, we found similarities between ciphers and rewrite rules. To refresh your memory, I've included an example below.

Plaintext: wetternullsechs 
Ciphertext:IPRENLWKMJJSXCPLEJWQ

From the example above, the rewrite rules would be the following:

w -> I 
I -> w 
e -> P 
P -> e 
{...} // continues 

Now off to the Temple of the Forbidden Eye!

The Temple of the Forbidden Eye has mysterious writing on its walls. The symbols form a substitution cipher with the English alphabet. Each symbol corresponds to the a letter as shown in the figure above. We'd like to be able to translate the writing within the temple (there's a lot of it).

The first thing we need to do in order to build a program to decipher an arbitrary set of Temple of the Forbidden Eye symbols is to download and install the Forbidden Eye font.

Fortunately the font has already been created for us. To obtain it, simply download it from the following website: Mara font - Forbidden Eye - from David Occhino Design. The download contains a zip archive which includes a True Type font which ends in a .ttf extension; the file is named forbe___.ttf.

On Windows systems, simply right click on the file in Windows Explorer and select the Install menu item from the pop up menu.

To confirm that you've installed the font, open a new file in Microsoft Word. Then, select a font. Scroll down to the Forbidden Eye font and choose it.

After you've chosen the font, you can type the mysterious Forbidden Eye symbols in Microsoft Word.

Now that the font is installed, we're all set to develop our program to translate those symbols back to English letters.

I wrote a GUI program in C# to do this using Visual Studio. Here is a picture of my development environment. Essentially, the user clicks on a button with the symbol to be translated and the corresponding English letter shows up in the text box at the bottom.

Let's translate an arbitrary message that appears in the Temple of the Forbidden Eye.

Now let's run the program and click the button for each character as it appears on the wall of the Temple of the Forbidden Eye.

We see that the temple text says, "Drink deeply the water of life." This simple C# program performs a substitution of the temple symbol for its equivalent English letter. This is a very simple series of rewrite rules.

Each button click writes the English letter in a normal font rather than the Forbidden Eye font. This is an embodiment of a rewrite rule. In the process it decrypts the substitution cipher.

private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            textBox1.AppendText(button1.Text); 
        }

Each button implements a similar rewrite rule.

With this application, Indie will make it out of the Temple in one piece.

Maybe...

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References

Mara font - Forbidden Eye - from David Occhino Design