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One of the first “real” programs I ever wrote would encrypt a message using a substitution cipher and (more impressively) decrypt an encoded message without knowing the encryption key. Perhaps the first thing I had to come up with was an algorithm to take a cipher key that was used to encode a message, and transform it so that it could then be used do decode the ciphertext back into plaintext. I was aware of ROT-13’s property that if applied once to the plaintext, and again to the output ciphertext, it would yield the original plaintext. That is, ROT-13 is its own inverse. However, this is not the case for all possible keys, so I needed to find a more general algorithm.