[hackermailman]

Lecture 16 in this Discrete Probability pdf[1] covers how Diaconis and his students decrypted some prison ciphertext brought to them

[1] http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~odonnell/papers/probability-and-compu...

[theoh]

I found the original account by Diaconis, with more detail:

"The Markov Chain Monte Carlo Revolution" (it's the first example in the paper)

https://math.uchicago.edu/~shmuel/Network-course-readings/MC...