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“They Killed Kenny”: Meet The Kenny Cipher

‘Oh my God, they killed Kenny’

In Southpark, the character of Kenny is famous for dying in almost every episode. Overall, Kenny comes from a poor family and wears an orange parka with a hood that muffles his speech. Thus, all we hear are mumbles with a M, F and P sound. For this, we can create a Kenny cipher by replacing each letter with a triplet using M, F and P. This is similar to the approach of the Bacon cipher:

a   AAAAA   g     AABBA   n    ABBAA   t     BAABA
b   AAAAB   h     AABBB   o    ABBAB   u-v   BAABB
c   AAABA   i-j   ABAAA   p    ABBBA   w     BABAA
d   AAABB   k     ABAAB   q    ABBBB   x     BABAB
e   AABAA   l     ABABA   r    BAAAA   y     BABBA
f   AABAB   m     ABABB   s    BAAAB   z     BABBB

With the Bacon cipher, we only have two letters (‘A’ and ‘B’). This five of these letters will give us 32 (2x2x2x2x2) permutations. This is only enough for the lower case letters. In the Kenny cipher, we want to represent both upper and lowercase letters (and a space).

So, for a cipher with an ‘f’, ‘m’ and ‘p’, if we have three letters, there are 27 permutations (3x3x3). Now, if make the first character either upper or lower case, we will have 54 permutations (6x3x3), and which will cover all the required letters. And, so our cipher can map upper and lowercase letters, and a space…