My first meeting with cryptography came along with the game #CovertAction by #SidMeyer some time in my 20s. Everything else in the game was sort of interesting, but code cracking was THE reason i played the game.

I remember being at an interview at FRA (Swedish NSA) when a guy said that "This is the kind of thing you solve with a pen and paper" and that trying to code something was a "waste of time".

A few years later i was playing Covert Action and thought "How can i automate this?" (remembering the words of the cryptographer i spoke to).

I realised that i could recode N-grams into other character sets and brute force them with known words that was in the game. I sat down, wrote some code and i could now break the substitution encrypted messages almost instantly.

In the video below, i break the messages in my head, because i've played the game like 4712623 times and still remember all the encoded messages (Advantage of having #Eideticmemory), it's simple when you have the solution stored deep inside your brain somewhere.

I just love #eideticmemory. Trying to get NFS shares up, wondered how i can show the NFS shares on the Windows Server 2022.

Suddenly got an image in my head from an old Hacking documentary i saw >20 years ago that said "Showmount -e <ip address>"

Eidetic memory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eidetic_memory

The Mystery of S., the Man with an Impossible Memory
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-mystery-of-s-the-man-with-an-impossible-memory

John von Neumann was similarly gifted: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann#Eidetic_memory

His Wikipedia page is *very* interesting.

[see also] Episodic memory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Episodic_memory

#HumanMemory #EideticMemory #vonNeumann #EpisodicMemory #memory #intellect #PhotographicMemory