I recently completed step 7, when I wondered if anybody else could relate to this:
1) Come up with a brilliant idea about how to decrypt Z340
2) Convince yourself that this MUST be the solution. It just makes so much sense!
3) Gather the tools needed to perform the solution — AZDecrypt, Microsoft Excel, whatever.
4) Begin the solution process
5) See indications that this solution will not work. Ignore them.
6) Keep pushing the solution — past the point of ridiculousness — in the hopes that you can MAKE it work.
7) Give up. This isn’t it.
8) (Optional) See the flaw in this solution — it was never going to work!
9) Cycle back to step 1.
Three more and you’ll have the requisite twelve.
Three more and you’ll have the requisite twelve.
That really made me laugh! I think you’ve made an accurate assessment!
I share your pain.
Funny summation. We all go through that process in a way.
Step 1 . Eat a bag of shrooms.
Step2. Chase it down with a 40 of Old English
Step 3. Grab a kaleidoscope
Step 1 . Eat a bag of shrooms.
Step2. Chase it down with a 40 of Old English
Step 3. Grab a kaleidoscope
Every bit as productive as my approach, and a lot less frustrating.
I recently completed step 7, when I wondered if anybody else could relate to this:
1) Come up with a brilliant idea about how to decrypt Z340
2) Convince yourself that this MUST be the solution. It just makes so much sense!
3) Gather the tools needed to perform the solution — AZDecrypt, Microsoft Excel, whatever.
4) Begin the solution process
5) See indications that this solution will not work. Ignore them.
6) Keep pushing the solution — past the point of ridiculousness — in the hopes that you can MAKE it work.
7) Give up. This isn’t it.
8) (Optional) See the flaw in this solution — it was never going to work!
9) Cycle back to step 1.
Bumping this from 2019 because it didn’t age well.
About 20 months after you posted this, David Oranchak, Jarl Van Eycke, and Sam Blake actually solved Z340. Here’s how their process went:
- Identify the transposition scheme computationally.
- Test it.
- It worked.
No cycling. No giving up. No kaleidoscopes. They succeeded because they used computational methods with explicit constraints, tested millions of possibilities, and let the math select the answer. The Z340 solution was verified independently and is now universally accepted.
I mention this because your nine-step cycle describes what happens when you work by hand, with intuition, without a systematic framework — which is exactly how you approached Z32 in your own paper. You picked Allen’s house, measured backward from it, and checked whether the cipher could accommodate it. When I asked if you used any software, you said “I used no computer programs.”
The Z340 team didn’t work that way. I didn’t work that way either. My solver enumerated 2,044,224 candidates, filtered them through three independent constraints, and produced 54 survivors — a 99.9974% rejection rate. The top-ranked candidate lands 254 meters from a triangular ground anomaly next to Lake Herman Road.
Your nine steps are a perfect description of confirmation bias in the absence of systematic methodology. The cure for the cycle you described isn’t step 9. It’s writing code, publishing it, and letting other people run it.