I think there may well be coincidences in the letters where i’m seeing patterns so I’m skeptical of my own findings to be honest in my first post. I’ve downloaded the rest of the ciphers and i’m working on the 340 cipher as we speak. The cipher obviously bares similarities to the previous ciphers but the author has changed his pattern in order to either make it more difficult or conceal. But I will say this, the 408 cipher has problems in that it changes it’s key several times and although there is repetition on most sections, who ever decoded it has either been very lucky or smarter than most members of MENSA because the combinations are massive.
In fact, you’d say at some points that who ever decoded it must be in contact with who ever coded it.
I’ll give an example, on the very first line the words ‘I LIKE KILLING’ has four letter ‘I’ in it, each ‘I’ is represented in four different symbols by firstly a triangle then a letter ‘P’ then the letter ‘U’ then the a reverse ‘K’. No repetition at all in character representation yet the author then represents the letters K and L with character repetition of Box symbols, a forward slash symbol and the letter B. The rest of 408 repeats this pattern.
What’s the problem? You’d have to be specifically looking for the word ‘kill’ or ‘killing’ for to decode it in the way that it has because the combinations are massive without those words. Then you need to ask why was the decoder looking for the word kill or killing instead the words murder or murderer? The combinations without knowing the word kill or killing are approx 148200. That is because the symbols although they repeat in many cases can mean many things. 148200 isn’t the number of words, it’s the number of word combinations. To work out the possible words you’d have to multiply the number of words in a dictionary by the combinations which would be something like 24276000000 word combinations.
This means that the very first line of 408 is in fact the key to the rest of the cipher and the word ‘kill’ is part of the key. I’ve checked for relative frequency of 340 and 408 and neither can be done probably past E, T and A. In 408, the author uses the + symbol to represent the letter E and in 340 + is there many times, I think it appears 23 times which is about half of it’s proportional status. In 408 E is represented by 9 symbols, mainly by + but the rest spread between 8 different symbols or letters so you can see why relative frequency decoding is difficult because some of those are shared with others. For example the decoded letter E is represented by an actual E in the cipher but is E in the cipher also decodes to the letter S too. So you can’t set about number crunching it because you’ll end up in all kinds of mess.
340 can only be decoded the same way as 408 and that is with a key, 408’s actual decoder had the key, they must have done or else the decoder was the coder. It intrigues me that the first three letters of 340 spell ‘HER’. This could be an indication that the key in the first line is a woman’s name, maybe a rock star from the time or an actress or maybe related to the coder? I need to read about the case before I go further.