I joined the forum after the first episode of this show. I like mysteries and puzzles and found this forum.

I don’t know much about statistics or ciphers, but I am a numbers guy, so I have done a lot of reading (lurking) on the forum, especially this sub forum on solving the ciphers.

But even as a novice I can not believe that "professionals" would go on TV and vouch for this as a solution to this cipher.

Just in case I am missing something (as a novice), is there any possible cipher system that could yield this "solution"? I have been reading on other threads about shifts and cycles and other stuff. I am still trying to understand it all (it is very interesting).

But assuming there were multiple steps to the key, is it still even possible to come up with this result?

I only looked at the first part of the History Channel solution, because I couldn’t find a good picture of the second half. But based on the first 8 rows, I see the following:

136 positions that contain 59 unique symbols. I started to try to analyze the use of the symbols and letters to make any sense out the "system" they used (trying to back into their solution), but I gave up.

If anybody more skilled in analysis even cares to look at the distribution of Symbols and Letters used in the first 8 rows of the History Channel solution, I have attached some screenshots. Maybe somebody will benefit from the wasted two hours of my day.

The Symbols / Letters in the columns to the right are in the order they were used in the History Channel solution.

Anyway, I appreciated all of the information on this forum, I enjoy learning about ciphers and coding. Maybe I’ll be able to make a contribution someday.

Thanks,

Ben