Doing a bit of number crunching, got cryptool set on really wide parameters and I’ve converted every letter and symbol into numerical values. It will take it hours and hours but if there any strings in the split version then it should find them.

The syntax is wrong and applying all the magic in the world isn’t changing this.

With magic applied:

Hi,

I do get a bit giddy at times and work on things too long. I get tired and jump to silly conclusions before I’ve really looked at things properly and I make mistakes when tired.

I often feel the same

What you describe reminds me of a kind of rail fence transposition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_fence_cipher

I like your idea, because it can be realized with pen and paper. However, I don’t think the step of swapping even and odd rows is very likely. If you have a transposition idea, I think you should always consider how the author built the cipher. What steps are necessary to create such a transposition? In other words, how do you proceed the other way round? So if you have plain text and want to create the transposition you described from it? At first glance, this seems much more complex than deciphering.

The bigrams you show seem quite normal to me at a first look. Even if you randomly shuffle a text, such patterns appear. In such cases you have to be careful not to get lost in interpretations. I think that you should first rely on a solver for interesting transposition candiates (like yours). However, this is only my personal opinion.

Here is an example of how easy it is to create interesting patterns.

Here you can see a variation of z340 containing four pivots. These four pivots are also connected in a very interesting way. All you had to do was swap the columns.

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

Interesting, thanks for the reply’s.
Today I’ve been looking at why every 19th symbol throws certain patterns up but doesn’t produce text. I still wanted to know why I got the reps on the previous experiment so I compressed the lines back up instead of recombining like pictured below and went for the diagonals starting top left because usually when there are things like 19 steps before you get any patterns – it means diagonals. Then it occurred to me that because my split cipher has every other ciphertext character deleted – I’d interrupted the sequence somewhat. But then it also occurred to me that the 19th doesn’t work either but what if the 19th is touching the edge of something that we can’t see?
Anyway I crunched the diagonals on a block of 4 and got – FOLDER PRACTICAL COMPARABLE PLATFORM REDISCOVER YOURSELF MEDIUM SOUND SOUR TONGS ONCE TALL MAMMY WEAK THE LIST
There were some strings but not of any significance and the above words have nothing to do with the real cipher plaintext. But what IS significant is that if I run the original 340 cipher on 2 or 4 block it gives nothing but gibberish. So where are the words coming from on the diagonals and why do I get a very good key?
IMO, there is something in the diagonals but the analyzer I’m running in Cryptool can’t see it or maybe it touching the edges of it. It might be actually using the real plaintext letters, can’t find the key and is using it’s normal algorithm to substitute OR the diagonals I have are only a partial plaintext result because I’ve only done have of the cipher. I think the latter could be possible BUT how do I recombine both half’s back together?

Also notice the [Box symbol – G] I talked about earlier has now evolved into [Zodiac symbol – box symbol -G] on two occasions and a variation of it we go diagonal in the other direction. Haven’t had time to look for reps yet because I’ve been running algorithms most of the day. The next thing to do is reverse the ciphertext direction on the diagonals and crunch those.

I don’t think order/location of the symbols is necessarily the issue preventing a solution from being found. I have entered the various possibilities you have presented above into jarvel with no success despite also giving it massive leeway to find anything at all in a coherent manner.

Admittedly i only let jarvel run for a hour or so it just gets really slow whilst producing nothing new? is that normal?

I think a big issue is trying to prescribe one letter to any given symbol. The value of any symbol is i believe alternating on an unknown course which might be unique to each individual symbol.

All the effort put into the 340 reminds me of the saying “a million monkeys on a million type writers” If it the 340 was simply gibberish a whole range of solutions should have been found by now, we are talking possibly billions of combinations yielding nothing and the only explanation i sense is the continuous alternating value of the individual symbols all on a unique course.

Sorry to post this here, i have put a bit of time following your ideas and now understand why those who are most keen on deciphering the Z340 aren’t entertaining this avenue.

I don’t think order/location of the symbols is necessarily the issue preventing a solution from being found. I have entered the various possibilities you have presented above into jarvel with no success despite also giving it massive leeway to find anything at all in a coherent manner.

Admittedly i only let jarvel run for a hour or so it just gets really slow whilst producing nothing new? is that normal?

I think a big issue is trying to prescribe one letter to any given symbol. The value of any symbol is i believe alternating on an unknown course which might be unique to each individual symbol.

All the effort put into the 340 reminds me of the saying “a million monkeys on a million type writers” If it the 340 was simply gibberish a whole range of solutions should have been found by now, we are talking possibly billions of combinations yielding nothing and the only explanation i sense is the continuous alternating value of the individual symbols all on a unique course.

Sorry to post this here, i have put a bit of time following your ideas and now understand why those who are most keen on deciphering the Z340 aren’t entertaining this avenue.

There are many possibilities and this is just one avenue to explore. There may be a key that is staring us straight in the face but we can’t see it just yet. The mind of a serial killer or psychopath is warped so the solution may well we warped.

Don’t disagree, regardless of what i said i like the grassroots angle that you have presented here. Just need a bit of guess work and hopefully find a hook. I think there might be a formula in play which is something i don’t believe various decryption methods have really played with.

Those Tri-grams need a value “the” for instance.

Also the first line of the cipher is rather interesting and might be the biggest clue.

That’s my 2 cents.

I told ya lol.