Yes. It is the shape of the transposed versus untransposed graph lines that is important. My theory is that if a message is untransposed correctly, then the shape will be very similar. Graph periods 1, 2, 3, etc., and periods x, 2x, 3x, etc. The shapes of the lines will be very close.
Doesn’t comparing period 1 (2,3, etc) to period 20 (40, 60, etc) already imply that the same symbols are being counted, with some extras added?
Or to put it another way – why wouldn’t the graphs be similar? Aren’t you just finding the max bigram repeats at the x20 intervals already anyway? Maybe I’m just confused about the method.
Yes, they would be similar, and are counting largely the same symbols. I am saying that maybe the correct un-transposed graph line could more similar to the transposed graph line than all incorrect un-transposed graph lines.
Or to put it another way, is there a way to un-transpose a message incorrectly so that the untransposed graph line is more similar to the transposed graph line than the correct un-transposed graph line? Maybe there is. But maybe comparing lines can be a useful tool.
I am still trying to think of an articulate way to explain why the lines aren’t exactly the same in the same position. But to start, period 20, 40, 60 gets cut off at the beginning and end of the message, whereas period 1, 2 and 3 not nearly as much.
Yes, smokie27d was not a transposition message. It was mostly homophonic, except that I mapped symbol 19 to A, E, I, O and T. Jarlve requested two messages, one transposed and another not transposed, so that he could do something with reversing portions of the message to see what would happen with the cycles.
viewtopic.php?f=81&t=2617&hilit=smokie27d&start=880
It is not related to the graph lines idea, at least I do not see any relation. This weekend I will remake my graph line spreadsheet suite and start some experiments. With all of the formulas, it takes two processors a couple of minutes to perform all of the calculations. It will be a fairly simple analysis.
Your observation about the shape similarity of the two graphs is interesting. Could be useful to search for untranspositions that maximize the area and the graph similarity. Not sure how to measure the similarities — perhaps you could transpose both graphs to an common average value on the Y-axis, normalize them, and then compute the root mean square distance or some other distance metric for the two graphs. Or maybe just compare slopes (e.g., how many segments go up together, and how many go down together?)
Yes, maybe something like that. I want to start with a few visual comparisons and work from there. Thanks for the feedback.
Yes, they would be similar, and are counting largely the same symbols. I am saying that maybe the correct un-transposed graph line could more similar to the transposed graph line than all incorrect un-transposed graph lines.
OK – I think I understand now. The transposed graph line might preserve the information contained in the transposition scheme, including misalignments/skips/etc. And hopefully, the correct untransposition’s graph line is uniquely similar to the transposed graph line.
Yes, smokie27d was not a transposition message. It was mostly homophonic, except that I mapped symbol 19 to A, E, I, O and T.
Ah – that explains why the solver only got a partial solution when I ran it. But it was enough to get legible phrases that I could google around for to derive the complete solution.
smokie can you recall if it was your "smokie27" that solves.. ferengi rules of acquisition once you .. if not yours was it jarlves?
smokie can you recall if it was your "smokie27" that solves.. ferengi rules of acquisition once you .. if not yours was it jarlves?
I never did make a message with that plaintext. It must have been Jarlve’s. By the way, I probably won’t get much done this weekend, as other things have come up. Are you working with one of the solver programs? If you want, I can make a message that can be solved, just so you can play with the solver program.
I have been struggling along trying to get the hang of them.. Don’t make one up yet. A few weeks off..
That solve is from a Star Trek series.. Not sure how I did it..
Hey guys. I’m back, so and so, from my "break", which was supposed to last forever. I really was totally done with anything Zodiac related. Since monday or so I’ve felt the spark reignite and I’m happy to resume work on AZdecrypt in the background (particulary the manipulation solver in assisting with testing out various hypotheses). I need to catch up with the forum/thread and will take it easy.
Welcome back, Jarlve! It is really great to have you back. I look forward to your updates. Now let’s get this damned cipher solved so everyone can take a break! 
Good to hear Jarlve… Just made my day
It is good that you are back. I have been searching for other peoples’ work concerning 340 route transposition, and so far haven’t found much. A lot of the work on this thread seems to be very original, and is important. Currently I am taking things very slowly. I don’t work on the 340 so much on weeknights, and sometimes not on weekends. It is a hobby for me and I need to keep it that way for the current time. However, I do feel that we are circling in on it.
One thing we were looking at Jarlvie, was how ,19`s , 15`s or other bigrams could work together with the Pivots.
Thanks doranchak, Mr lowe and smokie treats. 
I still need to catch up with the thread and it’ll be something for the weekend.
I recently came up with a measurement based on cosine similarity (for more info, see the paper about how the Copiale Cipher was solved). Basically, if two symbols stand for the same plaintext letter, then they will tend to behave roughly the same way in the cipher text. That is, they will tend to be preceded by and followed by the same kinds of other symbols.
I wanted to see if correct untranspositions produced higher cosine similarity scores. This is similar to how we are looking for more repeating ngrams and fragments to appear when untransposing the Z340. But it, too, has a tendency to produce false positives. Namely, you can find an untransposition that produces large measurements, but the scheme is not the correct one.
So I ran a quick experiment combining the different measurements: 1) repeating bigrams, 2) fragment ioc (my custom measurement of repeating fragments), 3) comparison of cosine similarity distribution against shuffled Z340. The idea is to see if the different measurements confirm each other when a true untransposition is found. I didn’t find a true transposition but the "best" one found during the search was this:
FlipHorizontal() Period(15) PeriodRow(10) (Interpretation: Mirror the Z340 horizontally, then untranspose at period 15, and then read out the rows with period 10 — that is, print out row 1, then row 11, then row 2, then row 12, etc.)
dEB+*5k.L(MVE5FV5 B<MF<Sf9pl/C|DPYL 2c+ztZ2H+M8|CV@K< R/9^%OF7TB29^4OFT Ut*5cZG|TC7zG)pcl -+MVW)+k_Rq#2pb&R ddG+4dl5||.UqLcW< 6N:(+H*;>^D(+4(8K STfN:^j*Xz6-z/JNb jROp+8zF*K<SBKl%W VM)R)WkLKJy7t-cYA O&Dp+fZ+B.;+G1BCO y-RR+4>f|p+dp1*HB O|pOGp+2|5J+JYM(+ pzOUNyBO+l#2E.B)+ lXz6PYA>#Z3P>L#2b kN|<z2p+l2_cFKUcy ^D4ct+B31c_8R(UVF 5C^W(cFHk.#KSMF;+ Fz9G++|TB4-y.LWBO
That transformed cipher gave a high fragment ioc, high repeating bigrams (40), high cosine similarity scores, and was the highest-scoring in azdecrypt out of all the other ciphers I tested in that experiment (20722, compared to Z340’s 20338). It didn’t solve, but I was very interested that it included PeriodRow(10) after our familiar "flip horizontally + period 15" scheme. Might be worth exploring more in this direction. Meanwhile, I really need to apply this kind of search on test ciphers to see if it can even discover these kinds of schemes when they are truly applied.
That is very interesting, especially the row period find. As if he drafted the message in alternating rows, then transposed. Could you do me a favor when you get a chance, post the 340 with your symbols, like the one in the post above, normal, not transposed. Or point me to where I can find one that I can copy to a spreadsheet. I need to make a little spreadsheet so that I can convert your symbols to my numbers.
