"Oh, bother."
Professor Vector examined the last page of her
Arithmancy exam in dismay. She had returned to her office on the previous night
to write up the last few questions. They were supposed to be the easiest
problems on the test-- the simplest letter-to-number ciphers imaginable. She had
checked and double-checked them last night, and all had been in order. Now,
however, the first problem on the page appeared to be a string of meaningless
digits:
314201859921862055355814914799314253208254196522265414320388
"Now
that I think of it, I was a bit befuddled after the feast," she decided.
Last night's meal had been excellent, but she had eaten far too
much of the house elves' intoxicating troll's-liver pie; now it appeared that in
her after-dinner stupor she'd made some terrible mistake on these final
problems. She looked at the second-to-last problem, hoping it might have
fared better than the first-- it
hadn't.
276825473600934172164121992486315030286182975
"B-G-F-H-Y...
it's no use," she decided. "There's something wrong with these two problems--
some of the digits in the first one are pure gibberish, and they're all mixed up
with the real message so that it's impossible to read... and the second one is
all gibberish digits! How strange." She glanced unhopefully
at the last problem.
597!02411
Vector frowned. "There aren't any
extra gibberish digits in this problem, but there's something wrong-- that
exclamation point should go at the end of the word, so that the students know
how important it is." She sighed in dismay. "Not that it matters. If the
students don't solve the first problem, they won't be able to solve the second,
and if they can't solve the second one, they won't have any idea how to solve
the third... Oh, if only I hadn't eaten so much last night!"