AHAA!!

I’m just adding this as comments. Probably completely throw-away.

In my many, nights of ‘staring’ at the 340. Literally. I couldn’t help but have my eyes drawn to, or start to see 3×3 grids. I wonder if it was down to the placement of certain characters? I don’t know. I think I wondered too at the time had he constructed the thing out of such grids. Like one of those jumbled up puzzles that you could solve by sliding the blocks around each other to re-construct a picture. The problem I had was that the whole grid was 17 wide. I would have preferred an even number of grids but that’s just me.

I don’t know enough to know if this ‘direction’ is valid but I do like it. I wonder if there’s any merit in testing the rotation aspect with the ‘pivots’. Ah, I don’t know tbh. and it’s late. I guess we need to find something consistent to try. i.e he just moved blocks of equal size around or he rotated blocks then maybe once all those things have been exhausted we would look at combination alterations. My worry is that we could be straying into a cipher construction/transposition equivalent of anagrams. Maybe not entirely if we ‘try’ and keep it simple.

Just thinking out loud and sharing but yeah – I think I’ve thought and wondered along similar lines at some point. Not sure I actually tried anything though.

glurk, dave help. It’s happening again. I’m ‘staring’ at it. lol

I doubt this is anything but that’s never stopped me before. With mini clusters/grids and rotation in mind I er…ummm spotted this. The main part if the ++OT part in red because it’s like a mirrored rotation then of course I spotted the Z and the R on either end so I’ve highlighted those in green. Sorry for hijacking your thread with this nonsense and I think I already know what glurk n’ dave thoughts will be on it. Although I think it does fall under relevant considering the pluses, rotation and 3×3 grids. I think.

so whats being discussed is the possibility of a jigsaw puzzle to start with? if that be the case start with the corner pieces.
I think i`m lost..

Thank you for pitching in traveller1st, I will be looking at your suggestion. He played around in the grid, I’m not saying the grid is composed of 3×3 parts but there may be more 3×3 swaps, at the moment I can’t exactly say what the rules of the game were or if the pivots have anything to do with it but I’m assuming they do. For now there is a lot of work that needs to be done. @Mr lowe, basicly yes, but I expect that the bulk of the cipher is still intact and that swaps need to be done just here and there. We may need to look for visual clues.

I wanted to look at the possible 3×3 including plus mappings in the cipher. Where they occurred basically. There are a few different configurations and I wanted to ‘see’ what they looked like. I started with + in the top left and worked on occurrences based on no duplication of the + within the grid. This yielded three configurations. Then I looked at the + in top centre position and in the centre position (there are obviously 9 positions to look at in total). I have visuals for them and can post them if required but rather than flooding the thread with images I thought I would just (try) to explain what I was doing and then show one example. I’m going with the + in the bottom right position because I liked the zync in that there is a + in the bottom right position on the cipher as a whole. It yielded a nice even spread too. I know we’re not restricted to the 3×3 but that’s what I’ve decided stick with at this point in the exploration.

Also, thinking out loud. Are we entertaining the thought if some of the +’s are markers for sections that have to be moved I assume they are no longer serving the purpose of symbols per se? Is there merit in, when looking at difference sectors, considering the affect that would have on certain sections. i.e with a + being discounted how does that affect the remaining symbols and does it create a pattern that can be used to help identify where sections might be moved to?

Man, that sounds even more complicated than when it just in my head ha ha. Anyway, here’s the 3×3 grids with a + in the bottom right. There are other variations within this guideline but this one was the most evenly spread variation with no 3×3 sectors ‘touching’ each other.

EDIT.

Sorry I am going to show another one. One of the top left configuration options. The reason being is that it seems to ‘swallow’ a good chunk of the infamous pivot section.

I wanted to look at the possible 3×3 including plus mappings in the cipher. Where they occurred basically. There are a few different configurations and I wanted to ‘see’ what they looked like. I started with + in the top left and worked on occurrences based on no duplication of the + within the grid. This yielded three configurations. Then I looked at the + in top centre position and in the centre position (there are obviously 9 positions to look at in total). I have visuals for them and can post them if required but rather than flooding the thread with images I thought I would just (try) to explain what I was doing and then show one example. I’m going with the + in the bottom right position because I liked the zync in that there is a + in the bottom right position on the cipher as a whole. It yielded a nice even spread too. I know we’re not restricted to the 3×3 but that’s what I’ve decided stick with at this point in the exploration.

Also, thinking out loud. Are we entertaining the thought if some of the +’s are markers for sections that have to be moved I assume they are no longer serving the purpose of symbols per se? Is there merit in, when looking at difference sectors, considering the affect that would have on certain sections. i.e with a + being discounted how does that affect the remaining symbols and does it create a pattern that can be used to help identify where sections might be moved to?

Man, that sounds even more complicated than when it just in my head ha ha. Anyway, here’s the 3×3 grids with a + in the bottom right. There are other variations within this guideline but this one was the most evenly spread variation with no 3×3 sectors ‘touching’ each other.

EDIT.

Sorry I am going to show another one. One of the top left configuration options. The reason being is that it seems to ‘swallow’ a good chunk of the infamous pivot section.

Does this not take into account any overlapping ones? Looks like one was missed, second green box down from the top left, just to the right of the "M" there is another "+" that would also fit if it were in a bottom right position, though it would then overlap with both the 3×3 beside and above it.

That’s why I had ‘variations’ because some did have several alternative positions and, as you have deduced, I didn’t want to start getting into ‘overlapping’ at this stage. Or at all probably, too complicated. Actually I’m going to change that second image because two of the squares have two +’s. Can’t even stick to my own made up rules lol.

Traveller1st, your second example is quite similar to the direction I’ve been looking at. But I may have to back down a little, I shouldn’t make such wild claims.

In the last couple of weeks I have been coding on a system that can detect significant transpositions that are done after symbol assignment, which is still the assumption I’m going under for the 340. Consider this assumption A.

A demonstration of the system and you will see why I was so exited:

This 6 by 6 part is swapped in the 408:

Who would know right?

Then I select the area which I believe to be transposed, in this case the upper part. And the program returns the likely area where it should be, from 2 different systems.

System 1:

System 2:

You can see that both systems agree. System 1 uses the information of the non-repeats and system 2 uses distance information. I also have a 3rd system which compares the difference of what is before and after a symbol on average. All three systems can draw from up to 96 different cipher orientations to get a good average and avoid going in circles. It is also noteworthy to mention that if assumption A is correct that these systems do detect transposition in the 340 when compared to the 408 and others. I also have some data which could indicate that something that diagonally shifts the information of the cipher is going on. I probably will post on that tomorrow.

The main post in this thread which shows the 3 by 3 swap in the 340 is very significant for system 1 and overlaps with system 2 though system 2 only indicates that it belongs to the upper part of the cipher. In short, I’m not so sure anymore but it does seem like a plausible theory.

Re: Diagonals. This may or may not be of any use. I am in no way logically minded but I like to work with visual patterns. That’s what my posts here were for. ‘Visual assistance’ and nothing more. I like to try and help out in what little way I can in this aspect of the case. I’m a dabbler. In that respect don’t ever feel that you have to even reply to anything I post, much less consider it.

The diagonal thing rang a bell and I thought you might like to scan this short thread. The possible relevant part starts about 3/4 of the way down this first page. The stuff was about ‘pivots’ to start with which I believe dave and or glurk first spotted a few years prior. I think I started this thread to further discuss that in regards to something I might have ‘seen’. Either way it appears I decided to mention diagonals at some point and it drifted on to that for a few pages.

Just in case there’s anything of use.

viewtopic.php?f=81&t=964&hilit=diagonal

Thank you, I had not seen that before and you have no idea of how strongly this correlates with what I found out. I will start the write up on the diagonal shift now and I suspect it will be a large write up pulling data from various sources so hold on.

The human visual is the most powerful system on earth, it performs near instant analysis returned in a subtle manner.

So what was the solution? Any actual words?

I didn’t see this thread until today. Very interesting idea. Jarlve, is there something you see in the statistics and your experiments that makes you so certain about this scheme?

doranchak, zydeco,

At that time I became utterly convinced that some transposition was done after homophonic substitution. I wrote a routine that as you can see in the pictures in this thread works pretty well when it is actual. For a 3×3 transposition the original swap mentioned came out really strong. I now think it’s a fluke that is brought on by the "+" symbol, which is the real culprit because of its abundancy.

I then tried to hill climb the swaps with my solver and found out that just by the degree of freedom, you are able to rearrange the cipher to a high scoring pile of rubbish. Quite embarrassing.

I doubt this is anything but that’s never stopped me before. With mini clusters/grids and rotation in mind I er…ummm spotted this. The main part if the ++OT part in red because it’s like a mirrored rotation then of course I spotted the Z and the R on either end so I’ve highlighted those in green. Sorry for hijacking your thread with this nonsense and I think I already know what glurk n’ dave thoughts will be on it. Although I think it does fall under relevant considering the pluses, rotation and 3×3 grids. I think.

That pattern is interesting – it reminds me of the "omnidirectional repetitions": http://www.zodiackillerfacts.com/forum/ … =50&t=1339

I’m not sure how significant those kinds of patterns are (as always, if you include more degrees of freedom in the searches, the patterns become less meaningful since they are arising by chance). But, I think it would be very interesting to try to locate more of them.