at Friday, October 25, 2002 6:22 PM, bear was seen to say:

The implication is that they have a "hard problem" in their bioscience application, which they have recast as a cipher. The temptation is to break it, *tell* them you have broken it (and offer to break any messages they encrypt in it just to demonstrate) but dont' tell them how you did it. That would probably be even more fustrating for them than the problem was :)