A Fine Thing?

'A Fine Thing?' printed from https://nrich.maths.org/

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Have you managed to solve the entire Stage 5 Cipher Challenge? Solutions are now closed, but perhaps you want to take up the full challenge.

Successful solvers of this part were

Patrick, Woodbridge School, England
Matthew from Wilson's School in England
Sebastian from QEH in Bristol, England
Joseph from Hong Kong

Well done code-breakers!

The solution is as follows:

The llama or Lama glama is a South American camelid, widely used as a pack and meat animal by Andean cultures since pre-hispanic times. Although early writers compared llamas to sheep, their similarity to the camel was soon recognized. They were included in the genus Camelus along with alpaca in the Systema Naturae of Linnaeus. Someone encrypting a message can make decryption more difficult by choosing unusual words and removing punctuation and the spacing between words. See if you can work out the method used for encrypting this message. Think about sequences if you get stuck.

Affine cipher:

a -> Q

b -> Z

c -> I

d -> R

e -> A

f -> J

g -> S

h -> B

i -> K

j -> T

k -> C

l -> L

m -> U

n -> D

o -> M

p -> V

q -> E

r -> N

s -> W

t -> F

u -> O

v -> X

w -> G

x -> P

y -> Y

z -> H

x->9x+8