Fun anecdote.  I took a cryptography exam, where the question was &quot;Progress as far as possible towards decrypting or decoding the following message:&quot;, followed by a sequence of letters in alphabetical order- several As, a different number of Bs, and so on.  It seemed obvious to me that a message that has been sorted into alphabetical order cannot be reversed without luck and a computer, so I assumed the unencoded version was something we could guess.  On a hunch, I checked the question itself, and sure enough, the answer was &quot;Progress as far as possible towards decrypting or decoding the following message&quot;.  Apparently I was the only one to figure it out.