Cryptography is the practice and study of hiding information[5]. We decided to do a project on encryption with brute force decryption. Our goal was to use the computer to decide when we had a correct decryption (instead of looking at each possibility with our eyes and deciding when we had a correct decryption). The way we decided to use the computer to do this was to use a spelling checker to test each decryption and see which decrypted output had the most English words.

We did research on different types of simple encryptions and decided to use the Caesar Cipher for testing. We thought that maybe if we finished this type of encryption we could try some more complicated ones.

The Caesar Cipher is a simple shift cipher, and is a type of substitution cipher.  For example, if there is a shift of 3 and you want to write the word AXE the result would be DAH.

Illustration 1: Example of a Caesar Shift of Three for AXE -> DAH