The following is merely to close with a simplified ‘description’ of the one solution produced here as a result of initially committing to the idea that the Z32 has been given to us as a problem to be solved. To aid succinctness, this summary description is intentionally devoid of any discussion as to what may have led to any one of the steps given. Likewise, it is presented in that way which gets to the result quickest, without consideration as to whether this reflects a plausible ordering of steps during any reasonable attack on solving the problem.

The proposed solution, then:

1. In the Z13, have the three ‘8-ball’ symbols encode ‘I’. (View.)
2. Likewise, in the Z32, find the three symbols that are present in the Z408 and there encode ‘I’ also, and give these the same encoding here, including where duplicated. (View.)
3. Interpret, from the numbering around the compass rose on the Phillips map, the expected unit for the bearing in the Z32 as ‘SIGNS’ and fit this word around the ‘I’ as given in step 2. with the encoding reverse-‘K’. Duplicate the first ‘S’ (plaintext) under the cipher encoding of ‘O’ to where this is repeated later in the cipher. (View.)
4. Complete ‘EIGHT’ at the very beginning of the cipher and transfer the resultant ‘E’ (plaintext) to its equivalent place later in the cipher, as given by the duplication on the very first symbol. (View.)
5. Directly transfer the encodings obtained thus far for the symbols that are common to both the Z32 and the Z13 across to the latter and match all duplicates there. ‘SIGNS’ is completed in the Z13 to evidence the presence, also, of one position-transposed character, contextually having been shifted from an original position at 2 in the cipher. (View.)
6. Interpret the last sequence of 6 characters in the Z32 as being equivalent, as to plaintext content, to the span of equal length from characters 2–7 in the Z13. Note that this uniquely associates the three ‘8-balls’ in the Z13 encoding ‘I’ with the three symbols in the Z32 used in the Z408 to encode ‘I’, supporting the choices made at the start in 1. and 2. (View.)
7. Interpret the two-character sequence prior to this last in the Z32 as being likewise equivalent, as to plaintext content, to the remaining unaccounted-for characters at 1 and 11 in the Z13. (View.)
8. From 7., complete the cross-encodings of each of these two characters where it is absent in the one or the other cipher. This gives ‘E’ (plaintext) for the second letter of the remaining 6-letter word on the duplicate ‘N’ (cipher text) in the Z13. (View.)
9. Identify that this latter can only be reasonably completed with either ‘GEMINI’ or ‘MEDICI’, with a heavy favour towards the former on contextual grounds. (View.)
10. Complete the remaining block of the Z32 cipher by inserting ‘PLUSFOURINCHES’, as the only one of two alternatives which makes landfall on the Phillips map. (View.)
11. Interpret the thrice-repeated ‘8-ball’ symbol in the Z13 — the only inherently numerical symbol occurring anywhere in the ciphers as a whole — as intended to indicate the value of the bearing (‘8 signs’) in relation to this cipher.

As stated, this would not be the route actually taken towards solution in practice. However I believe, in the manner of a ‘walkthrough’, it does capture the essence of the solution in a way which best facilitates welcome peer evaluation.

Try it! See what you think.

In conclusion, from the considered study and evaluation presented here, my own personal assessment as to the result would be:

… that, through the resulting co-solution of the Z13 and the Z32 to convey precisely the same information (minus the range, in its entirety, in the case of the shorter Z13), founded as this is upon a necessary cross-identification of the three ‘8-ball’ symbols in the Z13 uniquely with the occurrence in the Z32 of the three symbols encoding ‘I’ in the earlier Z408 (p = 0.004) — and which cross-identification unequivocally fixes the units for the bearing, the value for the bearing and the range, and further unambiguously completes the text of the Z13/32 beyond the statement of the bearing/range — the probability of this co-solution not being correct for both must be assessed as very, if not exceedingly, small.

@shaqmeister

I’ve read through your chess-problems thread carefully, and I want to engage with it respectfully because the reasoning framework is genuinely thoughtful. The chess-problem analogy is a good one, and I agree with its central premise: the Zodiac designed Z32 to be solvable, not impenetrable, and the constraints he provided are the key to solving it.

Where I think the method goes wrong is in a single early decision that cascades through everything that follows.

You reject all candidates in radians — every single one — because your formatting rules require unabbreviated unit words (RADIANS, INCHES) and you insist that both units must be either both abbreviated or both full-length. When the radians candidates all come back empty under these rules, you conclude radians is excluded and move on to degrees, signs, and hours.

But the Zodiac’s own postscript says “radians & # inches along the radians.” He used the word RADIANS himself. He did not write SIGNS. He did not write HOURS. He did not write DEGREES. The very source material you’re working from tells you the angular unit, and your filtering rules eliminated it.

The reason your filter produced an empty set for radians is that you required the format [ANGLE][RADIANS][CONNECTOR][DISTANCE][INCHES] — angle before distance. But the plaintext IN THREE AND THREE EIGHTHS RADIANS TEN puts the distance first, then the angle. Your template family didn’t include this ordering. My solver tested 12 template orderings. Six of them produced zero survivors, which is itself informative. The ones that survived include distance-before-angle arrangements — which is how you’d naturally say “three and three eighths inches along the ten o’clock radian.”

Also, the word RADIANS in the plaintext is not functioning as a mathematical angular unit. It means “radial lines” — the spokes of the clock system. The Zodiac told us this: “inches along the radians.” You measure inches along a line, not along an angle. So RADIANS and the clock-hour system are not in conflict. RADIANS TEN means “the tenth radial line.” This resolves the tension you spent several posts working through.

Your solution — EIGHT SIGNS PLUS FOUR INCHES NE GEMINI — requires assuming: a shared key with Z13 (unverified), that “signs” is the angular unit (never mentioned by the Zodiac), that the 8-ball symbols in Z13 encode I (assumed), that the last six characters of Z32 match characters 2–7 of Z13 (assumed), and that GEMINI completes the plaintext (one of two options you acknowledge, chosen on “contextual grounds”). Each assumption is individually defensible but collectively they form a long chain where every link is a free choice.

My solution requires assuming: homophonic substitution (consistent with Z408 and Z340), a clock-hour system (drawn on the map by the Zodiac), the word RADIANS (written by the Zodiac), and the map scale of 6.4 miles per inch (printed on the map). Every assumption is grounded in something the Zodiac himself provided. And the result — 54 survivors from 2,044,224 candidates, with the top-ranked one landing 254 meters from a triangular ground anomaly near Lake Herman Road — is testable.

You wrote, in your own framework: “Here’s a candidate solution that follows a method of solution that would appear to be strongly indicated by the context, and which benefits from exhibiting actual, probability-quantifiable intent — this is far the most superior.” I agree with that standard completely. I just think my solution meets it more cleanly than yours does.

@coder1987, thank you for your feedback on this dormant and essentially passed-over thread from four years ago. As to the proposal of your own that you mention, you will be aware that I have given my extensive analysis of this elsewhere in the relevant threads. I shall, however, decline entirely the implicit invitation here to engage in posturing theory comparisons as not being, in general, something of interest to me.

Posted by: @shaqmeister

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@coder1987, thank you for your feedback on this dormant and essentially passed-over thread from four years ago. As to the proposal of your own that you mention, you will be aware that I have given my extensive analysis of this elsewhere in the relevant threads. I shall, however, decline entirely the implicit invitation here to engage in posturing theory comparisons as not being, in general, something of interest to me.

@shaqmeister

Thank you for the kind words about the feedback, and I completely understand not wanting to engage in posturing. That’s not what I’m after either.

I do want to say something that I think is overdue: your chess-problems thread deserved far more engagement than it received. You wrote thousands of carefully reasoned words over dozens of posts, methodically working through constraint after constraint, and as far as I can tell, not a single person responded to any of it at the time. That’s a shame. The framework you built — that Z32 is a problem designed to be solved, that the constraints must guide us to a unique answer, that mere possibility is worthless without probability — is exactly right. I adopted the same philosophy independently, and I suspect that if you and I had been in conversation four years ago, we would have made faster progress together than either of us did alone.

The same thing happened to Oliv92, who also arrived at the same plaintext as DMW and me, also tested millions of candidates, and also received essentially no engagement from the community. Good work getting ignored seems to be a pattern on this forum, and I think it’s worth naming.

Where we diverge is narrow but consequential: your filtering rules excluded radians-based candidates because no template with distance-before-angle ordering was tested, and because the abbreviation “IN” was not permitted alongside the full word “RADIANS.” My solver included both of those possibilities. The result is that your exhaustive search produced an empty set for radians and moved on to SIGNS, while mine produced 54 survivors — with the top candidate pointing to a testable physical site.

But I want to be clear: your thread is the closest thing to a predecessor my work has, and I think you deserve credit for that. The intellectual scaffolding you built in 2022 is sound. It just needed a wider search space and a ranking algorithm. I hope you’ll consider engaging with the substance of the comparison, not because I want to posture, but because you are one of the very few people on this forum who would actually understand the argument.