Alteryx Shakespeare Decryption

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  alteryx Workflow

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  Challenge Text Sample

Inspiration

With limited programming knowledge, our goal was to tackle the alteryx encryption challenge using only alteryx's R GUI analytics/data management platform.

What does it do

Our workflow decrypts the given text file, translating it first into it's current form — Pig Latin — and then into common English.

How we built it

To decrypt this message, Alteryx was the sole software used in analyzing the data and finding the secret message. First, two-character pairs were identified, as well as their frequencies, to find and further their translations. After a directory was built to identify the different code pairings, the linguistic structure of Pig Latin was coded into multiple formula nodes so that Pig Latin terms could be translated successfully to English, regardless of the normality of the word.

Challenges we ran into

• How to break the encoded text into patterns; we spent a lot of time mapping the different possibilities of how to begin identifying patterns.
• How to programmatically translate text from Pig Latin to English. This included construction of catch-all functions that would transform any Pig Latin words into English. After researching common consonant clusters, these functions became much more efficient in successfully translating to common English.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The successful analysis of the encrypted text and derivation of the translation directory, assigning two-bit couples to single English characters.

What we learned

• Basic decryption principles and possible methods for programmatic decryption.
• This was uncharted territory for us. We learned a lesson here in creative problem solving and flexible thinking to handle an unknown challenge.
• Specifically within alteryx, using the find/replace tool to inject decoded characters.
• Further within alteryx, using the crosstab and transpose tools to rearrange the data from single words in a column to joined words in a single row.

What's next for the project

Perfecting syntax decryption and translation accuracy... and a long night's sleep.

Built With

• alteryx
• determination