Secret Languages on paper seem super fun.  Imagine, you are writing something and only your friends are able to understand.  But once you try to put this plan in action, it is very hard to create a language that you both can remember but nobody else can understand.  That’s why I wanted to share a code that I created which in my opinion, is great.  But, there is 1 problem: When I publish this, it’s not very secret because anyone can read it.  But if you want you can use it elsewhere, I guess?

01000 00101 01100 01100 01111,  

That spells hello.  With most secret languages you would have to remember each letter but with this one, you don’t (Sorta).  Look at the text below to see if you can try to understand it:

10100 01000 00001 01110 01011            11001 01111 10101            00110 01111 10010

10010 00101 00001 00100 01001 01110 00111          10100 01000 01001 10011.

01001       01011 01110 10101 10111         01001 10100 10011       01000 00001 10010 00100

Alright, that took a while, so you probably want to hear the secret, and it’s a little confusing but if you’re really determined to understand it, you can.  

A cool little fact is, if you double a number, the sum of all the previous numbers equal 1 less than that number.  For example 1, 2, 4, 8.  The numbers before 4 are 1 and 2 which add up to 3 and the numbers before 8 are 1, 2 and 4 which add up to 7 and so on.  Using this property you can make every number in between 1 and 31 (1 less than 32) with the numbers 1, 2, 4, 8, 16.  Because there are only 26 letters of the alphabet, this works.  This is similar to binary where the place values are 1, 2, 4, 8, 16 and so on unlike the typical 1, 10, 100 and so on.  The 1 means that you include this number place value in your sum.  All you have to do now is figure out what letter of the alphabet this is.  Personally, I use A = 1 B = 2 etc but you can change it to add an extra step.

The first 10 Numbers using this system

16 /8 /4  /2 / 1

0 0 0 0 1                     – 1    

0 0 0 1 0                   – 2

0 0 0 1 1                   – 3

0 0 1 0 0                   – 4

0 0 1 0 1                   – 5

0 0 1 1 0                   – 6

0 0 1 1 1                   – 7

0 1 0 0 0                   – 8

0 1 0 0 1                   – 9

0 1 0 1 0                   – 10

If you don’t understand anything that’s ok.  But if you do, you can try to figure out what I wrote towards the top.