Problems

Upon the installation of a keypad lock, each of the 26 letters located on the lock’s keypad is assigned an arbitrary natural number known only to the owner of the lock. Different letters do not necessarily have different numbers assigned to them. After a combination of different letters, where each letter is typed once at most, is entered into the lock a summation is carried out of the corresponding numbers to the letters typed in. The lock opens only if the result of the summation is divisible by 26. Prove that for any set of numbers assigned to the 26 letters, there exists a combination that will open the lock.

The key of the cipher, called the “swivelling grid”, is a stencil made from a square sheet of chequered paper of size $n\times n$ (where $n$ is even). Some of the cells are cut out. One side of the stencil is marked. When this stencil is placed onto a blank sheet of paper in four possible ways (marked side up, right, down or left), its cut-outs completely cover the entire area of the square, where each cell is found under the cut-out exactly once. The letters of the message, that have length $n^2$, are successively written into the cut-outs of the stencil, where the sheet of paper is placed on a blank sheet of paper with the marked side up. After filling in all of the cut-outs of the stencil with the letters of the message, the stencil is placed in the next position, etc. After removing the stencil from the sheet of paper, there is an encrypted message.

Find the number of different keys for an arbitrary even number $n$.

A message is encrypted by replacing the letters of the source text with pairs of digits according to some table (known only to the sender and receiver) in which different letters of the alphabet correspond to different pairs of digits. The cryptographer was given the task to restore the encrypted text. In which case will it be easier for him to perform the task: if it is known that the first word of the second line is a “thermometer” or that the first word of the third line is “smother”? Justify your answer. (It is assumed that the cryptographic table is not known).

To transmit messages by telegraph, each letter of the Russian alphabet () ( and are counted as identical) is represented as a five-digit combination of zeros and ones corresponding to the binary number of the given letter in the alphabet (letter numbering starts from zero). For example, the letter is represented in the form 00000, letter -00001, letter -10111, letter -11111. Transmission of the five-digit combination is made via a cable containing five wires. Each bit is transmitted on a separate wire. When you receive a message, Cryptos has confused the wires, so instead of the transmitted word, a set of letters is received. Find the word you sent.

Try to read the word in the first figure, using the key (see the second figure).