Although the most commonly used computer encoding takes two 4-bit data values and maps those onto an alphabet or a conventional set of alphanumerics, Cletus’ example in post #123 above isn’t straightforwardly that.
For discussion sake, however, his 64 hexadecimal (’hex’ for short) characters could represent 32 alphanumeric character values, which would be sufficient to hold most people names or many shorter phrases.
Other mappings can compact more characters onto a given number of binary bits, such that, for example, if one used a 5-bit mapping of alpha (since a..z < 32 (or 2^5 bits of data)) only plus a few special codes, one could get 51 characters of alpha codes into 256 bits of binary data. As a single set of whole numbers, those bits could represent a number from 0 to approximately 11,579,300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. (That arcane 1.15792e77 in that other post.) Exponential notation is commonly used to encode other rational numbers as two separate values, an exponent and a mantissa.
Other compression techniques generally recognize patterns in strings and can use “left-over code values” to compress or decompress conventionally-recognized patterns. Using such a technique, one might readily get hundreds of alpha characters in the 256-bit (64 hex character) stream from post #123.
Clever encoding techniques used upon a finite set of possibilities could represent thousands of characters within the 256-bit stream above.
Muh brain!
Thanks. Good stuff.
If y’all want to check out a real-life example, look at Q trip code from early 2018. Compare it to late 2018.
Ignore the alphanums and tell me what you see?
As I pointed out, soon after the trip code changed, that Q definitely HAD been compromised and CodeMonkey provided a “double encryption” trip-code shown by the leading ^2^ exclamation points instead of the single ‘!’ from earlier.
Why is that relevant? Look how long it took for [them] to find the right combination. Since encryption is logarithmic, it should take [them] MUCH longer, possibly 512 times longer.