Sift and Tally

frequency analysis — counting letter patterns to break ciphers

A story read by Sift and Tally

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01 Opening
Sift and Tally beat 1 of 5

- "I" - "II" - "III" - "IIII" - "IV" - "V" - "VI" - "VII" - "VIII" - "IX" - "X"

02 Sift and Tally
Sift and Tally beat 2 of 5

- "28" - "23" - "IIII/" gate-allow-text-pattern: '^([0-9]{1,4}|I{1,4}/?|V?I{1,4}/?|IX|XI{0,2}|\|{1,5}/?)$' ---

03 Sift and Tally
Sift and Tally beat 3 of 5

Sift’s fingers drummed a frantic rhythm on the wood. "Look at it, Tally! It’s a mess. A beautiful, wonderful, impossible mess. Where do we even start? There are so many!"

Tally didn’t look up from sharpening a row of pencils, each one honed to a perfect point. "We start where we always start," Tally said, their voice as smooth and even as a polished stone. "Not with the meaning. With the shape." Tally lined up the ten sharpened pencils in a neat, parallel row. "Not with the story. With the count."

Sift bounced on the balls of their feet, leaning over the scroll. Their eyes weren't reading. They were scanning, searching, hunting. "Yes, yes, the count! I see a bunch of the little squiggles with a tail. And the double-dot one! It’s next to the boxy one again! Oh, this is going to be good."

04 Sift and Tally
Sift and Tally beat 4 of 5

Sift swooped over the coded message like a hawk. Their job wasn't to count, not yet. Their job was to see. To find the rhythm in the jumble, the habits of the person who wrote it. They ignored the few symbols that appeared only once or twice. Those were lonely letters, the Js and the Qs of the secret world. They weren't important right now. Sift was hunting for the popular ones.

"There!" Sift chirped, pointing a slim finger at a symbol that looked like a tiny, lopsided crown. "That one. It’s a regular chatterbox." Sift’s finger darted from one lopsided crown to the next, a firefly connecting invisible dots across the page. "It’s everywhere. It must be important."

Sift then noticed something else. "And look," they whispered, leaning closer. "See this pair? The arrow and the circle? They're almost always together. Like best friends." Sift circled a few of the arrow-and-circle pairs with a dry finger. They didn't make a mark on the precious scroll, of course. The map was in their head. They gathered the patterns, the clumps, the lonely symbols, and the friendly pairs. Sift was the scout, reporting back on the landscape of the code.

05 Closing
Sift and Tally beat 5 of 5

Sift began to call out the symbols, moving across the top line of the scroll. "Lopsided crown! Box! Circle! Arrow-and-circle! Lopsided crown again!"

With each word from Sift, Tally’s pencil made a tiny, neat vertical mark in the correct column. When a column reached four marks, the fifth was a swift diagonal slash through the first four. A neat little bundle of five. It was a language Tally understood perfectly. The stacks of tick marks grew, column by column, a city of numbers rising from the page. Tally didn't need to see the code anymore. They were listening to its heartbeat, one tick at a time.

After an hour, Sift’s voice was hoarse and Tally’s ledger was full. Tally’s pencil moved one last time, writing a final number at the bottom of each column. They slid the ledger across the table. "The count is complete," Tally announced.

Sift peered at the numbers. The column under the lopsided crown symbol was by far the tallest. The number at the bottom was "42." The next closest was the boxy symbol, with only "28."

The CipherForge ensemble

Sift and Tally is part of CipherForge's distributed-narrative cast. Each character embodies a different curricular primitive; together they teach the full subject.