Jarl and Geoff,

You will both be missed and thank you for all the contributions you have both made as they continue to pull me down the rabbit hole…

You both leave big shoes to fill, so I will do my best in sparkly high heeled pumps!

Good luck to you both! And do please pop in once and a while to say hi!

-marie

Hey all. Sorry to say that my cryptology work and forum activity/visits will be minimal for 2018, reason is that I want to move into other things.

I started feeling the same way several weeks ago. I too need to move on to other endeavors. I won’t be gone completely, but am at a point where I feel that I have few new ideas to share and am just ready for a new chapter. Thanks for everything that you have done. Your contribution was substantial, amazing, and will not be repeated. We had a connection, and I really had a lot of fun working with you, especially when we had the same thoughts at the same time even from geographically so far away. Good luck with whatever it is that you do.

Geoff

I completely understand smokie and had been feeling like this for half a year. We had a very good run and bounced many ideas of eachother. An amazing time. Thank you for everything that I was able to learn from you and have fun in whatever you do!

Jarl and Geoff,

You will both be missed and thank you for all the contributions you have both made as they continue to pull me down the rabbit hole…

You both leave big shoes to fill, so I will do my best in sparkly high heeled pumps!

Good luck to you both! And do please pop in once and a while to say hi!

-marie

Thank you marie.

I hope Largo can step up and extend his solver to homophonic substitution.

Jarlve and smokie, thank you both for everything you have contributed to this effort, and I wish you much luck in your future endeavors!

Hi Jarlve and Geoff!

It’s a real pity that you two are now working on other things. With you two important cornerstones of this forum are going away. However, I can understand you very well.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank you. Both for the pleasant communication and the imparted knowledge, as well as for the great contributions and tools. I really have learnt a lot from you!
To me, even though z340 has not (yet) been solved, it was a great time, which brought me many new insights not only on the subject of encryption. I’ve dealt with many aspects of programming and other things I’ve never seen before.
It’s nice that you will occasionally look at the forum and not completely disappear. I wish you both much success with the things you do next.

Translated with http://www.DeepL.com/Translator

I concur with all the nice things everyone is saying.
cheers

Thanks for the program, for the hard work around these ciphers, and for the attention and civility you’ve always had with me and with everyone.
A great 2018 for you Mr. Jarlve

Thank you everyone.

A new AZdecrypt update (1.11) has been added to the main page.

What is new?

– Improvements to the substitution solver.
– Some of the Stats 1 and Stats 2 are improved.
– The program should no longer crash after exiting on some systems.
– New solver, Substitution + columnar rearrangement. Solves rearrangements of columns. The amount of columns and more can be set via Options, Solver, (Substitution + columnar transposition & rearrangement) …
– New solver, Substitution + columnar transposition. Solves keyed columnar transposition. The amount of columns and more can be set via Options, Solver, (Substitution + columnar transposition & rearrangement) …
– New solver, Substitution + period + nulls & skips. Solves unkeyed columnar transposition with nulls & skips. Similarly, its settings can be found via Options, Solvers, (Substitution + period + nulls & skips) …
– Added a Misc directory with a file trithemius.txt, this can be used in conjunction with the Substitution + vigenère wordlist solver to crack trithemius ciphers.
– Added a Versions directory which houses versions that have been compiled to work faster on newer CPU architectures.
– Added a Benchmark which can be found via Options, Benchmark.
– Solver performance mode. Up to 40% faster solvers but only works with English ngrams. Enabled via Options, Toggle solver performance mode. If the toggle is successful this message should appear:

5-gram solver performance mode enabled, supported:
--------------------------------------------------------
- Substitution
- Substitution + columnar rearrangement
- Substitution + columnar transposition
- Substitution + period + nulls & skips
- Substitution + transposition
- Batch ciphers (substitution)

And the ngram file should have a [PM] next to it:

Task: none
[PM] 5-grams_english_practicalcryptography_wortschatz.txt
--------------------------------------------------------

Can be auto-enabled via Options, Solver, set (General) Use performance mode ngrams if applicable to 1.

Excellent work, Jarlve! Thanks you very much for posting this update.

Excellent work, Jarlve! Thanks you very much for posting this update.

Thank you doranchak. Are you planning any cipher project this year?

I still very much wish to work on my cipher type identification project. But it may be a while before I have enough time to work on it, since I have taken up some paid part-time work related to crypto.

I still very much wish to work on my cipher type identification project. But it may be a while before I have enough time to work on it, since I have taken up some paid part-time work related to crypto.

That sounds great, getting paid for what you love to do. And in the meantime you are building up energy and ideas for your cipher identification project.

That sounds great, getting paid for what you love to do. And in the meantime you are building up energy and ideas for your cipher identification project.

Very true. I wish I had the resources to put together a team and have them bring the ideas to reality for me!

Another upcoming project: I was invited to give a talk at this year’s American Cryptogram Association convention, and thought it would be worthwhile to present to them the latest snapshot of what people think are the significant features of Z340, and what ideas they are testing out especially here in this forum. I’ve been following everyone’s progress here with great interest. I think it would be beneficial to connect this community with the ACA since they have talented codebreakers and I am really curious what they would make of all the weirdness in Z340, especially since they are very familiar with a broad variety of encipherment systems.

That sounds great, getting paid for what you love to do. And in the meantime you are building up energy and ideas for your cipher identification project.

Very true. I wish I had the resources to put together a team and have them bring the ideas to reality for me!

Another upcoming project: I was invited to give a talk at this year’s American Cryptogram Association convention, and thought it would be worthwhile to present to them the latest snapshot of what people think are the significant features of Z340, and what ideas they are testing out especially here in this forum. I’ve been following everyone’s progress here with great interest. I think it would be beneficial to connect this community with the ACA since they have talented codebreakers and I am really curious what they would make of all the weirdness in Z340, especially since they are very familiar with a broad variety of encipherment systems.

You will talk about the 340? It would be worthwhile to know the opinions of the ACA people on the 340 and perhaps our observations.

You will talk about the 340? It would be worthwhile to know the opinions of the ACA people on the 340 and perhaps our observations.

Yes, I will try to focus primarily on Z340. I’m eager to hear what they think. They spend a lot of time creating and solving all sorts of cryptograms in the magazine they publish every two months. The members seem very competitive, and track the scores of top solvers. Several have even written their own hillclimbers for cracking the codes. I’m hoping that giving them an overview of all of our observations will fuel their curiosity and motivation for exploring Z340.

Several ACA members also post their own homemade cryptograms in this Google Plus group: https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities … 1588941207