Misprints and Rarities
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#053:Etaoin Schrdlu
For centuries codebreakers have used 'letter frequency analysis' as a starting point
to crack certain types of coded message. The reason being that some letters in the
English langugage appear much more frequently than others. E is the most common,
followed by T, A and O. On the other hand, letters like Z, J, Q and X rarely get a
look in and are a long way behind (although on the plus side they'll score you a
lot of points in Scrabble*).
Assuminy you had plenty of time on your hands and you were able to tot up
all the letters in a book such as 'Alice in Wonderland', the order of frequency
would look like this:
etaoihnsrdluwgcymfpbkvqxjz
You'd get a fairly similar result if you were to do the same for 'Pride and Prejudice':
etaoinhsrdlumcywfgbpvkzjxq
But I digress. As fascinating as all this is it isn't directly relevant to the two-part
puzzle below.
1. READ THE FOLLOWING SENTENCE:
FINISHED FILES ARE THE RESULT OF
YEARS OF SCIENTIFIC STUDY COMBINED
WITH THE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS.
HOW MANY TIMES DOES THE LETTER F
APPEAR WITHIN IT?
2. IN 1969 THE AUTHOR GEORGES PEREC
WROTE A 300 PAGE BOOK CALLED
'LA DISPARATION'. HOW MANY TIMES DOES
THE LETTER 'E' APPEAR WITHIN THE NOVEL?
* Sadly not so for the Polish version of Scrabble where a 'Z' is worth just a single point. Uwierz mi!
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