Visualizing sets of numbers, 0-255 Any links to appropriate material are greatly appreciated.
We are assigned to write a program to visualize the AES encryption algorithm.  
We were wondering if any existing visualization methods exist to display the differences between two sets of numbers.  This would be the plaintext and the ciphertext (Represented as a number 0-255).  
Currently, we're using two methods of displaying the data and potentially a third, pixel colors in an image, sound levels in a short music sample, and a graph showing the weight of each value.
 A: i would think of spectral analysis. the plain text should probably have some patterns in it. the encrypted text should remove the patterns. so if you draw the spectrum using something like FFT ( fast fourier transform) of two files, they should probably look distinctly different. the original text should have some spikes in the spectrum, while the encrypted one should look like all noise. maybe wavelet spectrum would be even better than FFT
UPDATE: another way of capturing the patterns is something called Markov chains, see this interesting paper Using Markov Chains for Identification of Writers. In the simplest case you build the table where the rows are the first character, and the columns are the second character in all two-character sequences of the text, the intersection cell contains the frequency. For instance, ABCABAC would generate 3x3 table with rows {0 2 1}{0 0 1}{1 0 0} corresponding to {A B C}. The original text should have an interesting table, while the encrypted text should have a "boring" table, because it presumably removed all patterns.
