Very thoughtful and clean work in my opinion. Thank you very much for your contribution.

He began the encoding ( actually manual substitution) by purposefully not using the same symbol twice for the first forty or so characters. I would even hazard to guess that he tried to use most of the symbols he had before he started repeating any.

But that didn’t work because he would have been forced to use too many symbols at the beginning for some of the more frequent letters, and wouldn’t have enough unique symbols to safely "code" the rest of the message.

My premise is that he back tracked and swapped some symbols that he had already used, so that he could use them later in the matrix.

That is why he was forced to repeat symbol 5 in row two and then started re-using symbols rows three and four.

The distribution is uneven throughout the cipher because he overused some symbols for infrequent letters early on.

I agree with this basic idea and the regional bias symbols W and theta are examples of uneven distribution.

Unlike us, he didn’t have excel, word, pdfs, and software for analyzing the results to find unique patterns. Think about how long it would take to rewrite the cipher with pencil and paper every time he decided to tweak his code to change the distribution of the symbols.

Yes, this is very true!

I think the pivots are the result of using the same short words and letters very frequently in those section of the cipher. I think he is repeating himself or repeating the chorus of a song or stanza of a poem. . . . It would be interesting to force a bunch of poems, limericks and songs through the matrix and see how many "potential" pivots appear.

Doranchak looked at large amounts of plaintext to find pivots, but I like the idea that poetry or lyrics could possibly cause more pivots than regular English plaintext writing.

Thanks again for sharing all of the effort and knowledge on this forum. I have learned a great.

Thanks for watching and especially for making such a thoughtful contribution. Nice, clean, simple work. I wish I knew what caused the pivots, and have been thinking about them again recently. They are period 39 reading the message left right top bottom, and period 29 reading right left top bottom. Either way, there are also a lot of bigram repeats at those periods. The whole thing is a mystery to me and I still try to ponder how someone could have caused so many interesting patterns either by cipher or by hoax. It would have been pretty hard to do I think even by hoax. So much of it is not at all random, but to make all of the patterns co-exist together is really quite a piece of work.

What else do you think about anything, by the way? It is nice to hear fresh new ideas. Thanks.

You gave me an idea. I believe in transposition because of the period 19 bigram repeat stats. So here is the idea. A scytale like cipher. Take a piece of graph paper and wrap it around a round object, maybe a coffee can. Write the words of a poem or opera vertically, but every so often jog the plaintext to the right on column. Basically a staggered scytale where the lines of the poems are about the same length and the rhyming words line up with the staggered parts of the writing. Then unwrap and encode into the 17 x 20 grid like you said. Maybe that could make P19 and the pivots.

Thanks for the response Smokie.

I do have a few other observations. I would like to throw out. Let me organize my thoughts and I will post them.

I will readily admit that I don’t have a full understanding of periods and impacts of transpositions. I have read most of the posts on this forum over time, but I need to go back and do a little more studying.

The idea of writing it out on a round object is interesting. I can’t help but feel that whatever method it was, that it was simple and that he made some edits after his first pass at enciphering the message.

Obviously no one else had the key, so he could make changes on the fly. As long as the final key didn’t break any obvious "rules", he would think that we wouldn’t know that he modified the key after his first past at enciphering? (or he wouldn’t care)

I have a guess that he decided to use 64 symbols and used almost all of them up them up as he went. As he progressed through the message he couldn’t finish without going back to "steal" and replace some of the symbols in first few rows. Of course that theory doesn’t explain why he wouldn’t have use the 64th symbol. Unless he though he did, and it got copied incorrectly (smudged). Many of the characters are very similar.

A possibility to arrive at 64 symbols would be to use the 17 wide grid. If I were creating a list of symbols to use and I had a stack of grid paper with seventeen columns, I would number the rows down the first column for reference and then write out the symbols across the remaining columns on the paper. With column one as the row number, that leaves 16 columns for symbols. I would skip several rows for check marks or notes. Four rows of 16 symbols would give him 64 to work with. I read the check mark theory somewhere else in this forum, but I think many of us with come up with it on our own. (I spend about eight hours a day staring at excel spreadsheets and I do similar things with colors and other tick marks to keep up with where I am). I’m sure someone others have also proposed this theory to arrive at 64 symbols.

I suspect that he made some errors that he didn’t catch before he mailed the cipher. I think we all get tunnel vision when writing and proofing our own work. We know what it is supposed to say and we read it that way. I doubt he had someone he trusted to proofread it for him. I read my first post above at least three times before I hit submit and I had an obvious error at the very end. In the last sentence, I intended to say "I have learned a great deal. But I left off the word "deal". It would be very hard for me to encipher a message with 340 characters and not make errors. Especially when the many of the characters are very similar.

And since I am dealing with guesses and assumptions about him to help arrive at how he wrote the message (as opposed to analyzing the message itself), I will throw this out: Like many others, I suspect he had some type of mental illness. Maybe nothing severe, but ADHD or Bi-Polar II ? I can’t help but think he had highs and lows. During the lows he probably thought a lot about this obsession, but I doubt he worked on the cipher.

During the manic phases he worked on the ciphers and messages, but during manic phases, the person gets in a hurry, he likes to think about the process and the outcome, but actually "doing the work" is boring. Sloppiness can be a result.

I didn’t mean to diverge from discussing the cipher itself. I just think we need to constantly be aware that there are probably errors. These could impact the cycles or patterns we are trying to use to solve the cipher. Patterns we think we see are just errors.

Sorry for the long post. Now I am going to go learn more about the period 19 situation.

Please forgive me if some of these thoughts are contradicted or rebutted by the decryption methods and software that you guys are using to break this code.

Cheers!

Curious Ben

I will post again soon.

What type of excel spreadsheets to you stare at 8 hours a day? Just curious. I have many dozens of really cool spreadsheets that I made to create messages like the 340 and detect statistical patterns in them. Sometimes I open one and don’t even recognize it. It’s that bad.

I do believe in transposition, but I also think that it could be a hoax. Just one created with a system. I am open minded about the whole thing, except that if it was just a straightforward left right top bottom inscription then it would have been solved by now. Jarlve’s program, for one, can solve messages like that even if they have one symbol like the + that maps to several different letters. Even more than one polyphone. And with a lot of nulls, and writing that is backwards, and other issues. The 340 is not like the 408.

The period 19 bigram repeats, which Jarlve discovered, it is not quite so easy to replicate a pattern like that with a straightforward homophonic message. You have to fiddle around with the key a lot to do that. A million shuffles produces very few if any spikes as high as period 19. With homophonic diffusion using about 63 symbols, however, period 1 bigrams are not diffused enough so that they don’t repeat themselves. And if a message is transposed creating some type of periocity, then those period 1 bigrams show up as the other period.

You can do it with military type ciphers. Just write the message into a grid horizontally, read the message vertically, and transfer the letters into a new grid horizontally. Rail fence ciphers, with two rows can do it, sort of, and so can bifid ciphers. Check out scytale ciphers too. They will do it.

You have given me some inspiration. Thanks!

What type of excel spreadsheets to you stare at 8 hours a day? Just curious.

Financial Analysis, forecasting, cost accounting, variance analysis, etc. Extracting and analyzing financial data from queries of financial databases.

I work with a lot of formulas and a little excel VBA (very little).

Pivot tables are my bread and butter. I don’t know how the world existed before pivot tables!

Super exciting stuff.

You gave me an idea. I believe in transposition because of the period 19 bigram repeat stats. So here is the idea. A scytale like cipher. Take a piece of graph paper and wrap it around a round object, maybe a coffee can. Write the words of a poem or opera vertically, but every so often jog the plaintext to the right on column. Basically a staggered scytale where the lines of the poems are about the same length and the rhyming words line up with the staggered parts of the writing. Then unwrap and encode into the 17 x 20 grid like you said. Maybe that could make P19 and the pivots.

Hi smokie. Hope all is well in your world. Scytale sends me into a tizzy everytime i see the word. I was thinking a long time back that a scytale was only practical to be made `physically` one row at a time. I am not sure if i ever tested that out, from memory all my spreadsheets were designed around a continuous run of 340 letters
I might as well go back and test that out.
Doranchak gave me some 20,000 scytales on a spreadsheet which i have looked through extensively but i would guess they were all computer generated in a continuous run as well.
cheers

I edited this post.

I was rambling without doing the appropriate research first. I am going to study the links suggested, and will some re-post some thoughts after I get a better understanding of cipher concepts.

Thanks guys,

Hi curiousben,

Very thoughtful and clean work in my opinion. Thank you very much for your contribution.

I agree with smokie, thanks for your contribution! I also think that the z340 problem may be much easier than we all think.

I think the pivots are the result of using the same short words and letters very frequently in those section of the cipher. I think he is repeating himself or repeating the chorus of a song or stanza of a poem. . . . It would be interesting to force a bunch of poems, limericks and songs through the matrix and see how many "potential" pivots appear.

Doranchak looked at large amounts of plaintext to find pivots, but I like the idea that poetry or lyrics could possibly cause more pivots than regular English plaintext writing.

Here, too, I agree, because these kinds of texts usually have repeated parts. The only problem with this is that such texts usually have many bigrams, even if you don’t substitute them cyclically. So far, I have not succeeded in encrypting texts with strongly repeated passages in such a way that the bigrams are low. But I will try to implement your described procedure. Maybe I will be able to reduce the number of bigrams significantly.

In general, you get more pivots if you substitute less cyclically. A transposition before substitution also increases the probability of pivots. I did some tests with my CipherFactory. I can post some details if desired.

An example (plaintext is from a news archive provided by Wortschatz, https://wortschatz.uni-leipzig.de/de ):

7mjWbnopSAKgTOkc8
8hBUsPLO30eGCPtMi
NbmO1XuE4HD2ABv3l
84h!I0!bn5elNxj1y
zCdQxfHrJIKYVuwst
!2XLSYemObPZi3!DA
OTAWx0J8JuUJMOncu
VNMXYFPy6oQOvzBxb
YPJ1G21!NCQpASeq0
bZ1T8y!VzgrWuQOsN
8P7cxyBtJbmSdnOCK
HDeToQnoIXOAPcLBS
MYOZWChT!MGdPNK"k
w2vwZpOLoDjifJMAp
BWzxqUClMvNPCyrse
KDH30t4mLJqV1SjOh
J3wKz6L8TrvsPbUAC
"Ob0u1c1dPPi29uNe
3K0JUxey713VQtOD1
wI!EzQFmhnopAHtbc

62 symbols, 2 pivots in the same direction, P19 peak, quite high IOC. The cipher can be solved very easily with AZDecrypt’s transposition solver.

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

Ben: You should familiarize yourself a little bit with transposition, other classical ciphers, and some of the other 340 patterns. Maybe read the first several pages here, and there are also links to some cryptography websites and books.

http://zodiackillersite.com/index.php

I found this website 100 top poems / poetry encylopedia and copied the top 100 poems ever into a word document. One is the poems, but I left out the names and authors, part I, Part II, stuff, etc. The other document is all condensed, without any digits, spaces, punctuation, line returns, paragraph symbols, etc. It is about 78 pages at 14 point font and enough to make 448 messages of 340. Some poems are short, some long, all crammed together and lots and lots of rhyming words roughly spaced apart evenly.

https//bestpoemsnet/topbestpoemshtml

Here are the word documents. Let me know if you can’t open the files and copy the contents. I think I did it right.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ … sp=sharing

I have to work on my house for the rest of the day. Still thinking about staggered scytale and poetry. Talk to you later.

Hi Mr. Lowe!

Thanks Smokie,

I will do some reading from the links you recommended. And thanks for the poems. I will play around with them.

I assume someone already has a tool that will identify pivots for your (time consuming to look for them manually!). If so can you let me know where I can find it?

Thanks,

I have on old spreadsheet that highlights period 16, 32 and 48 unigram repeats, or period 18, 36 and 54 unigram repeats. Here is a screenshot, but to look at a lot of text, you would have to paste it into the spreadsheet one message at a time. On the left is a plaintext message, but as you can see, it shows a lot more that just pivots with just plaintext. On the right is the 340, and after diffusion by homophonic substitution, the pivots are easily recognizable. I work with numbers for symbols, as it is better for Excel.

It would be very laborious to examine a large volume of plaintext this way. I used the spreadsheet to look at example ciphers that I created. It’s not particularly sophisticated. I also have a sheet that I can paste up to 96 messages into one cell, and for a book, multiple cells. Then call up any chunk of 340 plaintext that I want, or call up a random chunk. I haven’t moved the poetry text into that spreadsheet yet. The other guys may have something much better, they use computer programs for their work. I don’t know.

I have some projects in the works, some cryptography, and some not. I am thinking about something different but similar to what you are thinking about, and contemplating some hours work to analyze the difference between regular plaintext and poetry, with a certain type of transposition. There is a spike at period 19, or period 15 reading right left bottom top, in bigram repeats. There is also a spike at period 39, or period 29 reading right left bottom top. It has confounded all of us, and the pivot symbols are on period 39 / 29. Not quite double 19 / 15.

Some work has been done to try to explain this, but there is no answer. Pivots are period 16, 32, and 48 unigram repeats, but there are a lot of period 39 /29 bigram repeats. So we don’t know what is causing the pivots. There are not a lot of 16, 32 and 48 unigram repeats in the message. But there are a lot of period 39 / 29 bigram repeats.

If you really want to get sucked into this thing, then keep looking at it and ask a question or two until you are up to speed. The people here will help you get it.

I may work with the poetry concept, and see if it can cause period 19 and 39 and pivots to coexist with each other that way.

Here is the 340, in numbers for symbols. I am open to working with someone on spreadsheets part time no pressure. Happy New Year.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17
18 5 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33
20 34 35 36 37 19 38 39 15 26 21 33 13 22 40 1 41
42 5 5 43 7 6 44 30 8 45 5 23 19 19 3 31 16
46 47 37 19 40 48 49 17 11 50 51 9 19 52 53 10 54
5 44 3 7 51 6 23 55 30 17 56 10 51 4 16 25 21
22 50 19 31 57 24 58 16 38 36 59 15 8 28 40 13 11
21 15 16 41 32 49 22 23 19 46 18 27 40 19 60 13 47
17 29 37 19 61 19 39 3 16 51 20 36 34 62 63 53 31
55 40 6 38 8 19 7 41 19 23 5 43 29 51 20 34 55
38 19 3 54 50 48 2 11 25 27 20 5 61 14 37 31 23
16 29 36 6 3 41 11 30 50 14 53 37 28 19 52 20 51
40 63 47 42 34 22 19 18 11 50 51 20 36 21 58 44 3
6 15 51 18 7 32 50 16 53 61 28 36 8 53 48 19 19
34 20 59 12 30 35 53 47 56 2 4 8 38 39 50 55 19
11 36 28 45 40 20 31 21 23 5 7 28 32 37 57 15 16
3 36 14 19 13 12 63 56 29 19 51 6 26 20 11 33 13
19 19 33 26 56 40 26 36 9 23 42 1 14 54 21 33 5
11 51 10 17 26 29 43 48 20 46 27 23 20 30 55 56 36
4 37 25 1 18 5 10 42 40 39 23 44 62 11 31 58 19

Thanks Smokie,

I will do some reading from the links you recommended. And thanks for the poems. I will play around with them.

I assume someone already has a tool that will identify pivots for your (time consuming to look for them manually!). If so can you let me know where I can find it?

Thanks,

One way is to use my old CryptoScope:

http://zodiackillerciphers.com/webtoy/stats.html

Scroll down and look for "Intersections of repeating symbols". Then click the Search button next to it. Clicking one of the results will highlight it in the cipher text.
To change the cipher text, click on it and it will change into an edit box. You can put plaintext in there too if you want. Just make sure it is in a grid/block format.

I am going to put something together where you can look at up to 96 messages all on one sheet, this week.

Ben: I hope you are still out there. I have the hard part mostly done, and can screen for pivots in any direction, one pivot pair top, two pivot pairs middle, and three pivot pairs bottom. Now I have to make the spreadsheet accommodate multiple messages from a large text. We can compare regular text with poetry and find out if poetry causes more pivots. And I can use it later to find out if transposition + poetry causes more pivots if I want to. I will share the spreadsheet with you. I have to work the next few days, so maybe little progress. Not sure.

Scroll down in the picture to see the screening.