if the 408 was deciphered only in our time, possibly many refute such a solution.
340 has its key, I think the likelihood of us or we break we find that key is null. Possibly someone will be out of it all, in the future, a guy who will look and see everything and will say, hey look at that key!

Among the group of proposed solutions do you have an explanation as to why the RG is such an outlier?

As I’ve explained, it’s because it’s a tiny sample of solutions that isn’t representative of the space of possible solutions. And since you don’t know what the distribution is, you don’t know what the expected variance is.

Think of all samples of solutions fitting into a bell curve. If the bell is narrow, then 50% higher than the average is significant, since few samples will be in that area. But if the bell is wide, 50% higher than the average will still fall well within its girth, so many samples will still be higher.

Well you said it was a good idea to study and compare six other proposed solutions with the RG proposed solutions. If the RG had come within the average would you still be saying it is too small a sample size?

If we looked at 10, or 20, or 100 pen and paper proposed solutions I think the RG would still be the highest for words and Zodiac/Crime words.

I think your zeal for debunking is causing you to close off one possible path to some progress before it has been fully explored.

But thanks for doing it. Your time is your own, and I seem unable to convince you the RG merits further computer based study. So be it.

Entropy – Of course the Z/C related words are subjective. What I was trying to do was account for the fact that almost all the words appearing in the six are of no possible relation to the case, and many are nonsense words or rarely used. I was trying to be reasonably inclusive for possible related words. I think the RG not only has the most (300% more than the average) but many are tightly bunched and many are undeniable Zodiac related – BOMBS, LIST, GAME, TIES.

Glurk – You picked a quote of mine from several years ago. I still strongly feel there is something here worth looking at, but I have tempered my enthusiasm a little bit. Dornachak agreed to compare the six proposed solutions to the RG. I think it is absurd to compare Graysmith and O’Neil working with pen and paper trying a hundred different starts a week with a computer looking for words doing a hundred starts per second.

All I am saying is in 40 years we are not one inch closer to solving the 340. No other pen and paper proposed solution is IMO as good as the RAW Graysmith, and the study shows that it has 50% more words appearing vertically, diagonally and backwards than six other pen and paper proposed solutions and 300% more Z/C words. And the best left to right read in the first 8 lines, before it mostly turns to crap, as do all proposed solutions so far. Would I like to see it compared to 20, or 50? Sure.

I think parts of the Raw Graysmith may be right. I don’t know what other steps are needed. I can only encourage you and doranchak, up2something and others to try some computer based solve attempts using parts of the RG. Nobody is interested. OK. Back to square one.

Ironically some analysis by Doranchak and Glurk partially confirmed the study by Quicktrader that Zodiac used more L and LL words than usual, and thus that might be a basis to at least TRY solving the + as L. As the RG does. If you solve + as L, and solve the 4th line start as SEE A NAME, and a few others, you end up with something that starts to look like parts of the RG. Now yes maybe the 4th line is GREEK NAVY as doranchak suggests, but isn’t SEE A NAME more fitting, given that Z letter sent in the "My Name Is…" code and letter, and hinted it may help to solve the 340?

Maybe it is hopeless to even try to solve the 340. I well understand the billions of possible combos. It won’t be solved by computers alone. I am using ideas and theories about Zodiac and my own intuition, as did Graysmith, O’Neil and Kite. I have hit a wall and am hoping someone can do a computer analysis from here. If not I will keep banging my head against the wall until it gets tired, which it is now.
———————————————-

Pretend there is no Graysmith.

Start with a blank slate. Using parts of the Harden Key, ETA frequency analysis and some word solve "guesses".

Can we provisionally solve one symbol, the symbol that occurs most frequently in the 340? That is the infamous " + ".

Starting with a blank slate, I think QT”s study, backed up by my analysis, and even work from doranchak and glurk, shows that the most likely candidate (or at least a very good candidate) for + is L.

So lets TRY the + as L. Add to that S99 as SEE. Solve for TH. I think the 3rd line KAC ZYN THEO SKI is interesting since it only happens by chance 0.003% of the time, so I include, others may not. If you proceed from there with further frequency analysis and possible word solve guesspothesis, you will usually end up with something looking at least in part like the Raw Graysmith.

This is what I think is worth TRYING as a starting point, to see if it gets us anywhere. It may or may not.

I think some of the recent work by QT, with some ideas and research by me (AK), doranchak, glurk and others, was some of the best collaborative and critical work done here, as it may have actually led us to perhaps solving one symbol of the code. Which is more than has happened in 40 years, and once again, a possible starting point.

I think Quicktrader’s original study was likely correct and add to it the fact that Zodiac had a particular personal vocabulary, which used "L" and "LL" much more than the average person.

Glurk’s study shows that TT, LL, SS and EE are the most used in English writing, with LL being the second most used.

So off the bat we have reason to consider ++ as LL.

In the first Zodiac Code he used "S" 24 times. Only once was there a "SS", and that happened in the phrase "it iS So much fun". Zodiac neved used a word that has "SS" in it, not once. Compare that to the number of words he used in the first code that had "LL" – SEVEN different words! And they are words we might think it is likely he also used in the 340 code. They were:

Zodiac also used these words with a single "L". – like, people, wild, girl, slaves, slow, animal, afterlife.

By my rough quick count, the letter "L" appears 33 times in the 408 code. About 8.1% of the letters are "L", which is about double normal usage, as it happens that many words Z liked to use have either L or LL in them. So if Z used "L" 8.1% of the time in the 408, it seems to me that 9.7% use in the 340 code is within normal deviation, really only two more uses of a word like kill, killing, collecting, etc., would do it. And if we strike the untranslated last 18, leaving us 390 translated letters, the 33 uses of "L" amount to 8.5%, which is even closer to my proposed 9.7%. in the 340 code.

GLURK: I’ve done a small bit of work on this, and I’m going to have to say that as far as Zodiac’s use of the doubled letter "L," he did in fact use it a lot.
More than would be expected in normal writing. Even in words that, properly spelled, would not have the letter doubled.

I did not do exact word counts, sorry, but in a quick study I’ve found:

ALL, ALLREADY
AWFULLY
BILLIARD
BILLOWY
BULLET
BULLSHIT
CALLED
CELLING
COLLECT, COLLECTING
CONTINUALLY
FILLING
FULL
HELL
HILL, HILLS
HOLLY
KILL, KILLED, KILLER, KILLING
PULLED
REALLY
ROLLED
SHALL
SMALL
SQUEALLING
TELL, TELLING
THRILLING
TITWILLO
UNTILL
VALLEJO
WACHAMACALLIT
WALL
WELL
WILL

This should be all of them, I think, unless I missed something… I probably did miss something…
I don’t, however, believe that the 340 is simply a homophonic cipher like the 408. But I also don’t have any doubt at all that Zodiac often used "LL" in his writings. He clearly used it more than would be expected.

DORANCHAK: Here are some others:

ALLEY (confession letter)
ALLEYS (confession letter)
ALLWAYS (1971-03-13-times)
BALL (confession letter)
BELLI (1969-12-20-melvin-envelope)
CALL (confession letter, 1969-11-09-chronicle, 1970-07-26-chronicle)
CELL (1970-07-26-chronicle)
FALL (1970-06-26-chronicle-cipher)
FELLOWS (1970-07-26-chronicle)
FOLLOWED (confession letter)
UNWILLING (desktop poem)
SPELL (1974-02-14-sla)
SPILLING (desktop poem)
WILLING (confession letter)
WILLINGLY (confession letter)
YOULL (1970-10-05)

AK-

I think that doranchak is being completely objective and fair in his analysis. I do think he made a mistake in agreeing to compare the Graysmith against 6 other "solutions," however.

Look at it like this. Say that you go to a beach somewhere, and using a very tiny spoon, you randomly pick up 7 grains of sand. Looking at them, you say "hey, this one grain of sand is black, and the other 6 grains
are white!" This black grain must be special!!!

While ignoring the the gazillions of grains on the beach around you.

When Dave says that your sample size is too small, that’s what he means. You are standing on a beach covered with an astronomical number of sand grains (but still less than the number of solutions to the 340) and
you are only looking at 7 of them.

I have no doubt AT ALL that billions – even trillions – or more "solutions" to the 340 can be found that contain words that would look "Zodiac/Crime Relevant." And it doesn’t matter if they are found by hand, or found
by a computer. The very fact that they exist shows that the Graysmith work is nothing special, and not an "outlier" in any way, as you claim that it is.

-glurk

Well you said it was a good idea to study and compare six other proposed solutions with the RG proposed solutions. If the RG had come within the average would you still be saying it is too small a sample size?

In that case, it would have been even more obvious that RG is not better than the other solutions. There would have been only three possibilities:

1) The observed average is higher than the actual average. If so, then all six solutions and RG are better than average.
2) The observed average is lower than the actual average. If so, then all six solutions and RG are worse than average.
3) The observed average is equal to the actual average. If so, then every solution is unremarkable.

The point is to find out if there’s something unique about RG. Far as I can tell, there isn’t.

If we looked at 10, or 20, or 100 pen and paper proposed solutions I think the RG would still be the highest for words and Zodiac/Crime words.

There’s another problem with the six solutions we looked at: They don’t all use the same approach. I think RG uses a monoalphabetic substitution key. Some of the others use very liberal keys that allow more than one letter per symbol. Others like Starliper’s are almost completely made up and arbitrary. If you allow for a completely made up solution to be in the sample, then we could spend all day cranking out pen and paper solutions that are better than RG.

It’s interesting that you dismiss the computer-generated solutions, especially since they don’t violate monoalphabetic substitution like some of the other solutions do. So even if we made a computer program that simulates what a pen and paper approach is doing, you would still discount it simply because a computer did the work?

I think your zeal for debunking is causing you to close off one possible path to some progress before it has been fully explored.

If the experiment had shown RG to be superior, I would have gladly reported that fact. But the experiment confirmed that many other solutions contain more words than RG, which means it is not remarkable among the possible solutions. You can interpret that as a zeal for debunking if you’d like, but it does a disservice to the conversation. By all means, keep exploring your ideas, because nobody knows what might cause the solution to emerge.

The 340 cipher contains 63 unique symbols, each of which can represent any of the 26 letters from A through Z.
So that means the number of possible "solutions" or arrangements of letters in the key is 26^63. That’s a very large number. Mind-bogglingly large.
According to Wolfram Alpha that number is slightly above 139 octovigintillion, which is also about 1.4 billion times the number of atoms in the known universe.

Here’s another bit of perspective:

Let’s say you were picking solutions at random from that humongous pile, and that the chances of picking one with around a dozen "Zodiac-related" words was about equal to the chances of winning the lottery (1 in 175 million for the Powerball jackpot). That means we’d expect to find this many "Zodiac-like" solutions:

790,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

A pretty big number!

Glurk – You picked a quote of mine from several years ago. I still strongly feel there is something here worth looking at, but I have tempered my enthusiasm a little bit. Dornachak agreed to compare the six proposed solutions to the RG. I think it is absurd to compare Graysmith and O’Neil working with pen and paper trying a hundred different starts a week with a computer looking for words doing a hundred starts per second.

AK-

I don’t understand your apparent distaste for using computers. If you were not using a computer, AT THIS VERY SECOND, you would not be reading this message.

If you asked me to send you a letter, and I typed it out with an old Smith-Corona typewriter, and mailed it to you, would you say "No, you cheated, I expected it to be chiseled into a stone tablet!"

If you asked me to solve a mathematical problem involving calculus, and I solved it using a TI-85, would you say "No, you cheated, I expected you to count on your hands and toes!"

Computers are just a tool like any other. And they don’t program themselves, a person has to do that. My own program, ZKDecrypto can solve the 408 cipher in only a few seconds. It does the EXACT SAME THING
that a person would do in solving a cipher by hand, it just does it much faster. And it took quite a long time to design and write.

Since the 340 has an enormous and vast number of possible arrangements or "solutions" why do you believe that that using "pen and paper" is somehow better?

-glurk

Say – how did y’all decide that the plus is an "L"? I’d like to know that. I must have missed summat. (Where’s the "numbskull" emoticon?)

Glurk you totally misunderstand what I was saying. I like computers. In fact I have been trying to get you and other computer solvers to pick up part of the RG and apply it to your programs. My point was that doranchak was using computer programs that look for vertical and other ways for words to appear and then comparing that to the pen and paper RG which was not looking for vertical and other types of words. That’s all.

Say – how did y’all decide that the plus is an "L"? I’d like to know that. I must have missed summat. (Where’s the "numbskull" emoticon?)

Nobody decided anything. But quicktrader did some good work which was later added to by myself, glurk and doranchak, which shows that Zodiac used words with L and LL far more than average. That might be a good reason to at least try solving the + as L, and see where if anywhere that takes us.

See the first post here: viewtopic.php?f=81&t=907

And glurk’s charts here: viewtopic.php?f=81&t=907&start=70

And my analysis above, along with that of glurk and doranchak. IMO all of this represents a reason to try the + as L.

Even ignored , give my opinion
Z was a freak , so he fled the rules , kill people, idiots wrote letters etc. .
Streamline the figure of a madman … is somewhat crazy …
There is no rule agreed to codebreaking , and the 340 is built differently ( provided it is not a farce ) . We need a key
If we prevent every attempt of someone , a theory , the key is lost .
The key may be something simpler than chord itself .
The programs developed by Mr. Dave and Mr. Glurk , save time , but it only helps the mind to find the way reassembly code , logically (although the author is illogical .) The work of AK is respectable . I see a lot of effort and goodwill .
We need a key or will fall like Alice :

"Alice: Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?
The Cheshire Cat: That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.
Alice: I don’t much care where.
The Cheshire Cat: Then it doesn’t much matter which way you go."
good luck to all
Marcelo

Nobody decided anything.

Right-o.

If anyone’s interested, I break down the Graysmith solution in the first episode of my new Youtube series:

https://youtu.be/N_Oh4snhF70