So an interesting thing that you may have seen around on the modern internet:

THE PHAOMNNEAL PWEOR OF THE HMUAN MNID.
I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdgnieg.
Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in
waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng taht the
frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses
and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid
deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.
Amzanig !

Although it's credited to Cambridge university it's been suggested that it was originally developed by the Russians.

It turns out that the Russians had lots of "outside of the box" approaches to dealing with the amount of money that America had.

The most famous example is whereas NASA developed a pen that worked in zero gravity the Russian's simply used a pencil.

Other lesser known examples include their solution to the problem of the electromagnetic pulse that comes after atomic explosions. The American's developed expensive shielding technology so their computers wouldn't fry. The Russians simply switched back to valves instead of transistors.

And then we come to cryptography. Lots of cryptography works by trying to find a match with a real word. Imagine if the real word when it comes out is actually still scrambled but still completely readable. That way no computer could hard crack a code.

This is similar to the other Russian code which was based on the following series: 1, 11, 21, 1211, 111221, ...

The series looks mathematical but isn't at all. It's based on how you say what you see. The first number is "one 1" so the second number is 11, The second number is "two ones" so you write 21 and so on. The code isn't crackable by a computer.

The Americans were throwing more resources at the tasks and the Russians faced with having less money had to think of a different way out of the problem.