How to Solve Cryptograms Part 4A, Using Pattern Recognition (TH Words) to Solve Cryptograms

Computers have been used for years for pattern recognition. A good example is the use of computers to recognize and distinguish between fingerprints. The laborious system of comparing fingerprints previously done by police departments and by forensics scientists is now a matter of a few clicks of a computer mouse. The human brain contains the most powerful computer in the world and pattern recognition is a task the brain does well.

So how does this relate to solving cryptograms? Pattern recognition is "the name of the game" If you are good at recognizing letter patterns within words, word patterns within sentences, and sentence patterns in encrypted quotations you will be very good at solving cryptograms.

A simple example of letter patterns in words is the use of the combination "TH". The word "THE" is one of the very common words in frequency of usage. But, as you are going to see, just because a word has three letters doesn't mean it has to be "THE". The sentence you just read has 5 of these 3 letter words outside the quotation marks and none of them are the word "THE". These words are: but, you, are, see, and has If however, you see another word in the same cryptogram containing "THE", within that word, you can see a pattern. For instance if you see the following encrypted words "DFS and DFSXS", you should see that the "S" appears twice in the second word, so you would suspect if "DFS" translates to "THE", then "DFSXS" is very likely to be "THERE", or "THESE" (it could also be "THEME". In the next article ("How to Solve Cryptograms Part 4B we will explore more TH combinations and how to use them to decipher more letters.