So I was looking at this page at all the names
http://zodiackillerciphers.com/wiki/ind … _Solutions
And it came to me, the message was written 50 years ago. It’s not necessarily a 26 character set writing out a full name.
Maybe periods and spaces expanded the character set? That would foil frequency analysis even more than having multiple characters mean the same plaintext letter. There’s scholarly article out there that make the point one goal of 340 was to foil frequency analysis.
So why does periods and spaces matter?
It was common to use your first two initials in your name in formal usage, like in the form of A. A. Smith.
I’ve seen other examples of a preferred name being like A. Adam Smith. L. Frank Baum is a famous example of that for.
Joe L. Alioto, the mayor of San Francisco at the time, their name is 13 characters with spaces and periods.
The last name could be up to 11 characters long if there’s no spaces or periods with two initials. It could be twelve if there’s only one initial.
Initials could be at the end, like if they wrote it in the form Smith, A. A.
Mimicking library sorting could make sense, in that era someone would have gone to a library to learn cryptography
Thought this could be useful for someone to know, because we’re much more informal today than in the 1960s and a lot of attempts I found clearly forgot that.
There’s also claims it could be unsolvable without the key. But remember the plaintext and the errors of 340 didn’t exist. It could be solvable with this new information. What if there’s clues in the uncorrected results? That there’s clues in how to shift the cipher text and clues for how to find the key within it.
The order to read the text could be the least important thing about it.
This is someone who said they weren’t afraid of the gas chamber, they had their slaves for the next life. Maybe they finally wanted to be caught and used some piece of text from a past cipher to encipher their final and most critical piece of information?
That if someone was good enough to break their hardest cipher they would be able to get their name.
