Decarad - A Useless Cipher

During a particularly slow day at work, I had to stimulate my mind to keep from going crazy. I was looking at what we call our RACF ID and thought, It's probably not super secure to store this in plain text on a sticky note... And so I decided to come up with a cipher that only I knew, so I got to work. I recalled a previous cipher that me and my brothers had created before based off of a video came called "OBDUCTION". The cipher was aptly named "Farley Code", as that was one of the main characters' last names. There were however some flaws with this cipher. Namely, it had to use brackets to differentiate groups/words, and it had no distinction between letters and numbers. Decarad was created to fix those two main issues, and it ended up being much more complete than I had originally anticipated.

Mathematics

Decarad falls under the category of mathematical ciphers. That meaning, it's not blindly memorizing symbols. Memorizing 32 symbols and their values would be quite exhausting, since it's approximately 1.25x the current roman alphabet that we use.

Each symbol has a base structure, called a radix. This structure has two forms: one for letters, and one for numbers, dictated by the top crossbar's orientation. Here we have a letter value:

And here we have a number value:

As you can see, each letter radix has 10 angles in it - hence the name decarad - and is composed of two brackets on the right and left, joined at the bottom. As well as the base radix, decarad has a modular asset called a "Pointer".

These pointers will be placed on various points on the radix (called a socket) to modify their numeric value. Keep in mind, radices can not have more than one pointer on a socket. The placement of the pointers directly affect the value of the radix, and they have a specific order which runs in a similar system to base 4. For each radix, all of the sockets on the right bracket equal one. On the left, from top to bottom is 16, 4, and 8, as pictured below.

The order of the sockets was arbitrarily chosen and was influenced by the much more flawed "Farley Code". Reading each radix will come with practice, but all you have to do is add up each pointer value to get the absolute value of the letter or number. This allows us to represent any iterable list, including foreign alphabets with less than 32 indices. Here we have a radix with the letter value "J".

Representing Large Text

As you may have noticed, each socket on the left side of a radix doubles as it gets larger. From 4 becomes 8, and after, 16. Large numbers are a bit tricky, and can come as a challenge for some. These numbers are read right-to-left, and use a modified socket value on additional radices. On the rightmost radix will be the default socket values of 1, 4, 8, and 16. To represent a number larger than 31, we will connect a new radix to the left, doubling the socket value with each increment, and leaving out the crossbar entirely (as this is a single radix). This means the socket values on the right side from top to bottom will be 128, 32, 64. And on the left, continue doubling. From top to bottom the left will appear as 1024, 256, 512. This allows for an exponential increase in upper limit, and will result in smaller radix groups to represent large numbers. Here we can see a radix of value 1234:

Conclusion

With practice, one will be able to read decarad as quick as they can do math. Please feel free to practice, or to reach out to me on Bluesky @kyanoxia.com , or join the Discord server at https://kyanoxia.com/join