Someone’s probably already done this, I just haven’t found it on the site.
1) Solving the ‘solvable’ letters in z13 using the 408 and 340 keys
and
2) mapping the homophones from each key to the letters in z13 as if they were plaintext, all in a single chart.
[image attached]
Nothing of note pops out to me, but I did notice that ‘K’ as plaintext is the only letter that, at any point, has no homophones that can output to it (that is in the 340 key). Additionally, the anchor is the only symbol (other than the (8)s) that has no exact corollary in the solved ciphers, though similar symbols output to ‘T’ in z340 and ‘O’ in z408.
An additional note; there was some discussion over in <Confirmed Zodiac Letters: General Discussion> I think about the (8) symbol and how weird it is to write an 8 in 2 strokes as 2 intersecting circles. Naturally this is exactly how I write ‘8’, but I don’t think it’s how Zodiac does, namely because he wrote an ‘8’ on the door of Hartnell’s car, and I’m pretty sure it was in a single stroke /attachments/carousel3.jpeg?resize=665%2C504&ssl=1
Not that this is a significant point towards a possible solution, if there is one, just an observation.
This is interesting, but probably a coincidence.
First off, now that 340 is solved, it’s possible to start making silly comparisons. There are symbols that appear in both ciphers so it occurs to me that a fancy chart or two could be a fun way to procrastinate from real life.
So what you can do is write out both keys in Alphabetical order. When you come across a symbol that appears in the other cipher, you replace that symbol with the corresponding plaintext assignment from the other cipher.
You end up with two charts full of regular letters that, in principle, would show if there was any deliberate conversion that took place between the two keys. It looks like this:
*red squares indicate symbols unique to each ciper
I think this is mostly right, but I still don’t know if the z340 key is ordered correctly, so that’s an asterisk.
What’s interesting is that, in z340, there are homophones assigned to ‘E’, ‘G’ and ‘I’ that all were assigned to ‘T’ in z408.
I don’t know how to explain this next part, but I’ll show you first and that may help make it clearer.
If you line up z13 with this first chart (z340 with corresponding z408 plaintext), then the (8) symbols are aligned with the 3 ‘T’s, with the midpoint centered on ‘G.’ This means that you can reverse the symbols in z13 and the ‘T’s will still be aligned with the (8)s.
Also interesting is that, when z13 is written in reverse, the (‘M’)s are also aligned with the same letter ‘S’. Unfortunately, when you do this, you also get (‘N’) and (‘K’) lining up with ‘E’, so it’s no as if you are getting a coherent set of relationships. Here:
I should also add, with these charts, you can count how far each symbol travelled through the alphabet from z408 to z340 and check if there is a preference for any particular distance. Assuming I didn’t mess it up, which I don’t think I did, there is a very tiny peak at n=13.
All of this could easily be (and probably is) just a coincidence. Just thought it was interesting enough to share.
I would list all the obvious features we can see directly in the cipher itself.
Okay, discipline. Not my strong suit but here it goes.
Without adding any ancillary information, there are a few other points to make here.
1. K and M are as far apart in z13 as they are in the alphabet.
2. There are 8 unique symbols.
3. Reading left to right, there are no repeats until the exact midpoint of the cipher. The symbol is (‘⑧’
4). Reading right to left, there are no repeats until one symbol prior to the midpoint of the cipher. The symbol is (‘M’)
5. Reading left to right, the last unique symbol to appear is (‘⊥’) or upside down anchor
6. Reading right to left, the last unique symbol to appear is (‘E’)
7. There are no repeating bigrams
8. I don’t think it is possible to remove any single symbol or symbol type from the cipher and get a repeating bigram
9. You can remove either (‘N’) or ⑧ symbols, bisect the cipher down its midpoint and reflect it without altering which symbols line up with one another.
10. With an odd number of symbols, its not possible that these are polybius pairs without a null symbol, an error or other complicating factors
Now regarding the solved 340 cipher, there is one other point that may or may not be relevant to z13.
The observation was made some time ago that the alphabetic letters in z408 all sort of make their way back to ‘E’, meaning if you keep substituting letters, most of the time you’ll just end up decoding ‘E’ to itself forever.
It’s not quite like that in the z340 key. Instead, if you follow this same process, you end up in an endless loop through the letters R-O-A-D-N-E. Here’s what I mean:
*Correction: ‘Z’ is not unused, it substitutes into ‘R’. ‘X’ is also not unused. It substitutes into ‘Y’
So if you write out the entire alphabet and start substituting every letter, row by row, you’ll have 23 columns, each repeating the pattern R-O-A-D-N-E. F and W stand for themselves and Q isn’t used.
They’ll never line up with one another, so each row will have a different sequence of letters until the sequence is recycled.
If you organize the chart by letter frequency in the cipher, which is presumably fairly close (maybe not exact) to how Zodiac’s key might have been laid out, then you’ll find A-E-N-A as a repeating string.
Worth mentioning, ⊕ decodes to ‘A’ in z340. It also decodes to ‘D’ in z408, which you can see just below in the same column.
I have no clue whether this is relevant or not. It all seems really complicated, which doesn’t really seem to be Zodiac’s style.
That said, given that Z presented this cipher in a manner that references z340, I don’t see a compelling reason to discount the possibility that the z340 solution has some relevance to solving this little puzzle. I’m also not married to the idea, though.
I don’t think we have any solid evidence suggesting he kept his materials from the creation of his ciphers, and if he lost his key to z340, he would either have to crack it himself from memory or wait until 2020 for doranchak, jarlve and Sam Blake to do it for him.
I’ll edit this post if anything else pops in my head (don’t worry, there’s space up there)
Okay I give up
What’s the actual answer?
[EDIT] dyslexia
