The one with multiple inscription rectangles, are they all the same size?
The one with multiple inscription rectangles, are they all the same size?
Yes.
Hey Jarlve. I want to thank you for making those messages. I spent a lot of time this weekend on my detection and manipulation spreadsheets. And a lot of time on symmetry, which is just in the beginning stages. That is a subject that I am very interested in, but so far I do not have everything figured out. I also had some plumbing issues at my house, which was and is continuing to be a small nightmare. But, again, thank you so much for the messages. Here is a solve for message 3, and I will give a more thorough report about how I solved it soon. I mean, it wasn’t that difficult, but I have some thoughts after solving message 3. Thanks again.
ILOVETOMAKEPEOPLEA
NMYCOMMUNITYHAPPYC
OOKINGFOROTHERSGIV
ESMEIMMENSEPLEASUR
EBUTIKINDOFHATEEAT
INGMYOWNFOODCLIMBI
NGHELPSMESTAYFOCUS
EDANDCHALLENGESMEW
ITHOUTFAILILOVELOV
INGPEOPLEWHODESERV
EITABSOLUTELYWITHO
UTADOUBTILOVELEARN
INGRUNNINGFEELSLIK
ECOMINGHOMEEVERYTI
MEIFINDTHATRIGHTRH
YTHMSWIMMINGGIVESM
EGREATPEACEREADING
ISDEFINITELYAFAVOR
EDIT: I have not had a chance to read and digest your above posts. But I wanted to tell you that I really appreciate what you have done so far. Your new program is really quite special, and made a very big difference in my ability to solve message 3. It is so fast, user friendly and efficient. Thank you.
Hey Jarlve. I want to thank you for making those messages. I spent a lot of time this weekend on my detection and manipulation spreadsheets. And a lot of time on symmetry, which is just in the beginning stages. That is a subject that I am very interested in, but so far I do not have everything figured out. I also had some plumbing issues at my house, which was and is continuing to be a small nightmare. But, again, thank you so much for the messages. Here is a solve for message 3, and I will give a more thorough report about how I solved it soon. I mean, it wasn’t that difficult, but I have some thoughts after solving message 3. Thanks again.
It’s no problem. I’m glad you are picking up on the symmetry idea and hope you can get something useful out of it or at least have some fun with it. It’s certainly not as easy and straightforward as bigrams. The symmetry measurement sometimes does insane stuff, here’s an example. Take the "solved" 340 below, it obviously has a bigram peak at period 1 because that’s how the solver works. But note that the symmetry measurement still finds the peak at period 19, bonkers. I have tested a 408 version of this to see if it was normal behaviour for transposition and it was. That the symmetry measurement is still able to find the period after solving the cipher in another direction just blows me away.
Good luck with your plumbing issues. Thank you too for your continued effort and I’m looking forward to your report. I think that working on the 340 can be a bit of a sacrifice, but at least we live in a time where we can still work on unsolved problems. When quantum computers really take off such times may come at an end.
GSHISCENTOPERNATM ESTELSILARLDEIAVO EDVANTOCARLORSEGI NSSPECTINGSITTHAT SUNTERIMPORTTHEOF STHERCISIMPORITAL SOTABLYTOACANDERP LATIVISITSELETORU MENTATCHTREADYSEA SECONTEITISPEREDS OTHFORSPALESANNAI TEACHIPIONENDTHER ESUNDSTEPOREALYTH CAREEVOTEADANERTT DECEIVEUPSINOCOST PADGEEALISEDVNBAT HANTRESPETRCREPOR TTORPERATINGNFLOS PROMREPRESLIEISPA INAGESONECITYPAYT Bigram repeats: Period 1 (untransposed): 190 <--- Period 2 (untransposed): 165 Period 3 (untransposed): 162 Period 4 (untransposed): 167 Period 5 (untransposed): 165 Period 6 (untransposed): 158 Period 7 (untransposed): 171 Period 8 (untransposed): 167 Period 9 (untransposed): 159 Period 10 (untransposed): 165 Period 11 (untransposed): 171 Period 12 (untransposed): 168 Period 13 (untransposed): 165 Period 14 (untransposed): 155 Period 15 (untransposed): 164 Period 16 (untransposed): 159 Period 17 (untransposed): 157 Period 18 (untransposed): 164 Period 19 (untransposed): 166 Symmetry measurement: Period 1 (untransposed): 2443.110400851574 Period 2 (untransposed): 1430.341475600534 Period 3 (untransposed): 2223.162484252153 Period 4 (untransposed): 2390.725504362895 Period 5 (untransposed): 2378.770263861119 Period 6 (untransposed): 1998.807121896926 Period 7 (untransposed): 2591.939258690046 Period 8 (untransposed): 1838.314429192364 Period 9 (untransposed): 2253.201892242126 Period 10 (untransposed): 1751.713267351888 Period 11 (untransposed): 1961.842009246488 Period 12 (untransposed): 1927.030985206581 Period 13 (untransposed): 2242.165548836959 Period 14 (untransposed): 2230.04240180296 Period 15 (untransposed): 1613.885078746708 Period 16 (untransposed): 2073.184056127522 Period 17 (untransposed): 1906.582973414917 Period 18 (untransposed): 1759.523827209733 Period 19 (untransposed): 3246.97447706697 <---
EDIT: I have not had a chance to read and digest your above posts. But I wanted to tell you that I really appreciate what you have done so far. Your new program is really quite special, and made a very big difference in my ability to solve message 3. It is so fast, user friendly and efficient. Thank you.
I matched the encoding and repeat potential to that of the 340 while keeping the same plaintext p1 active and then answered some questions from that position. The most interesting takeaway for me was that under these rules I could not get a cipher to have only 25 or 29 bigram repeats in 1000 encoding randomizations.
I’m glad you like the new AZdecrypt. I’m working on an update, if you have any issues or suggestions please mention them. By the way, I matched the 340 versus about 50 unique languages, also with period 15 and 19 and did not find any significant correlation. And the 408 correlates best with English from the south african region. Outside of the Zodiac ciphers, a piece of the Voynich manuscript correlated best with Ukrainian. I have mentioned it to Nick Pelling here: http://ciphermysteries.com/2009/01/11/u … ent-348560
Hi
I think that working on the 340 can be a bit of a sacrifice, but at least we live in a time where we can still work on unsolved problems
I totally agree! It is great to work on unsolved problems. The only thing is, that revealing the secrets of z340 won’t make the world a better place. Anyway…It is a lot of fun to work on such things and it must be a very cool feeling when AZDecrypt one day shows a ~22000 – ~25000 score and you know that you can read the text. Just like opening and ancient tomb for the first time since hundrets of years. Most likely z340’s plaintext contains the same weird stuff like z408 and the case remains unsolved. At least it is a very educational hobby. Other people are feeding slot machines with one coin after another. Trying to solve a cipher and learn lots of new stuff is way better!
The period 19 stuff with the "solved" 340 is really, really strange. At the moment I am still taking my break from 340 because it causes me headache =) There are so many odd things like odd/even bias, prime phobia, period 15/19 and so on. But not all of them can be true at the same time. Maybe I will begin from scratch. I still have the feeling that when the cipher gets solved one day we all will say "Doh!…it was so obvious!".
Solved by smokie treats:
COOKINGFOROTHERSGIV
ESMEIMMENSEPLEASUR
EBUTIKINDOFHATEEAT
INGMYOWNFOOD
….same for me except the latter. Not many people like their beef "english" / rare, so I decide for myself 
https://www.dropbox.com/s/xpl9058ooddnx0v/Cooking.jpg?dl=0
CLIMBINGHELPSMESTAYFOCUS
EDANDCHALLENGESMEW
ITHOUTFAIL
…and another thing in common:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/yaj03mnt81ax7bd/Climbing.jpg?dl=0
Enough offtopic for today…
It is great to see the progress of the people who are posting here.
I totally agree! It is great to work on unsolved problems. The only thing is, that revealing the secrets of z340 won’t make the world a better place. Anyway…It is a lot of fun to work on such things and it must be a very cool feeling when AZDecrypt one day shows a ~22000 – ~25000 score and you know that you can read the text. Just like opening and ancient tomb for the first time since hundrets of years. Most likely z340’s plaintext contains the same weird stuff like z408 and the case remains unsolved. At least it is a very educational hobby. Other people are feeding slot machines with one coin after another. Trying to solve a cipher and learn lots of new stuff is way better!
There’s always the possibility that solving the 340 could advance the case. An ancient tomb indeed! Possibly Zodiac’s last words.
The period 19 stuff with the "solved" 340 is really, really strange. At the moment I am still taking my break from 340 because it causes me headache =) There are so many odd things like odd/even bias, prime phobia, period 15/19 and so on. But not all of them can be true at the same time. Maybe I will begin from scratch. I still have the feeling that when the cipher gets solved one day we all will say "Doh!…it was so obvious!".
Sometimes you need to take a break from the 340 to put everything in place. I would try to focus on the goals you set. We can’t solve the 340 without tools, so tools need to be developed. And just try to have fun. There are indeed allot of strange angles into the 340. Period 15, 19 is where it is at for me. Its discovery has narrowed down the search and it is a tangible phenomenon that points towards transposition (classical cryptography).
The cipher smokie solved is a quote from Mia Li.
I think that you used an 18 x 18 inscription rectangle. Inscribed left right top down, read off top down left right, and inscribed left right bottom top into a 17 x 20 transcription rectangle. The last 16 symbols at positions 2 – 17 are nulls.
I looked for bigram repeats in all periods, and found that period 18 for the mirrored version had a spike at 18, but also mini spikes at 36, 54, and 72 compared to neighboring periods. I mirrored, un-transposed and mirrored again. I got a partial solve, so I went back and used a regional shuffle test for row 1 and row 20. The shuffle test was conclusive. It worked really well. Then I just deleted the nulls and un-transposed again. I had actually more time on message 2, and will return to message 1 and 2 soon. But I need to slow down a little bit and take a little break.
I do have some observations and thoughts about null positions, un-transposition and misalignment to discuss soon.
I think that you used an 18 x 18 inscription rectangle. Inscribed left right top down, read off top down left right, and inscribed left right bottom top into a 17 x 20 transcription rectangle. The last 16 symbols at positions 2 – 17 are nulls.
The message was formatted into a 18 by 18 rectangle and then taken off by columns BTLR. Then reformatted into a 17 by 20 rectangle LRBT while adding filler at the top. So you have everything correct besides the first inscription direction, or my notes are incorrect. I really like that you used a shuffle test to draw out the position of the filler row. Well done.
@Largo, is that you in the climbing picture? Nice hobby. I saw the documentary Valley Uprising on TV some time ago and was blown away by the larger than life atmosphere surrounding it.
Jarlve, in the thread http://zodiackillersite.com/viewtopic.php?f=81&t=3206&start=40 you posted two chunk based ciphers. One with size 7 which I had solved brute force and one yet unsolved.
I tried to solve those ciphers without brute force by using genetic algorithms. For the fitness function I used a weighted score for bigrams and trigrams. „Weighted“ means that I did not only counted the ngrams but weighted their occurence. A bigram which repeats 6 times in a ciphertext is much more worth that 5 bigrams which only repeats twice each. Two repeated trigrams are more worth than 5 bigrams and so on. I think one of you had talked about such weighted score in a different thread too.
I think it is called bigram ioc, or BIC. If a bigram repeats 7 times then it would score 42, unique_bigram_repeat*(unique_bigram_repeat-1). It can then be normalized in various ways but the raw value should do.
First I measured the solved „chunk size 7“ chipher. It scored 188.0 points in my system. Unfortunately this is not the highest score that can be reached by shuffeling the chunks. It is possible to get a score > 220.0. So my approach did not work since random shuffles can score very high."
It still may allow you to weed out a good percentage of the combinations that need to be tested.
I ran some period 1 to period 30 tests on various ciphers but I did not count the pure repeated bigram count. Instead I used my weighted ngram score. z340 still showed peaks at period 19 and flipped period 15. Next I compared cyclic versus non cyclic ciphers (ABCABCABC vs BACCBBACA). To me it was a bit surprising that some of the non cyclic ciphers scored higher at period 1 than the ones with perfect cycles.
This may be due to that your non cyclic ciphers have random symbol selection and thus produce a unigram frequency table that is less flat. The repeat potential of a cipher is heavily related to its index of coincidence. I usually use the raw value to get a feeling. It’s 2236 for the 340.
So maybe period 19/15 is not the result of a transposition (as you mentioned earlier too). Maybe it is a phenomenon which is caused by the type of the plaintext. On the other hand the period 19 / 15 peaks in z340 are still way too high. But imagine some sort of symmetry like „KILLEDXYZ – ME:2 – SFPD:0 KILLEDABCD – ME:3 – SFPD:0“. Some letters that correlate at specific positions may be a reason for the period 19/15 spikes.
I would say the chances are very small, trying to come up with such a plaintext will undoubtely create many bigram repeats at period 1 because of all the repeating words. I don’t think there’s a single sensible 340 length plaintext in the world which has more repeats at period 19 than period 1.
z340 flipped left to right, containing names and places….is it that easy? (I know…names and places had been discussed before)
Seems not:
HRAEHOSEANBARTEEL ANDIGERTOMASNELRA DLESHANTAMOLINSTE RDELLARDNITABERRI NEALLAROSHAMELICK NORTRESHITAARBETR SHEENANNORAMCDLOS CHULERAKLASANDRAN DAKITNERREMLDLIGH TTERGERALDBLNOAET ADIEDREROSEMONELO RELLEIAEOISDEANGR ETANNEROSALSTICKE LLMANNEDARONBARAA LTOMONTESCASIONET RACINEBRANDEEDENS HASETARLGSKOHLENE RANNELIAANTESTALL NSTIEARKEMEGTHERS LADSITAMEIERALOITNice .pdf and graphs. I knew about the peak at 5 in the 408.
Here is the solution to your names cipher. I was also unable to solve it with any of the regular ngrams so I created special ones: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B5r0r … 0RQZTljR28 that work with the latest AZdecrypt. Click on file and then load ngrams.
Spoiler alert: DAVIDFARADAYBETTY LOUJENSENDARLENEM ERRINMIKEMAGEAUCE CILIASHEPARDBRYAN HARTNELLPAULSTINE ROBERTDOMINGOSCHE RIOBATESKATHLEENJ OHNSDONNALASSLONN IEJEANMERRITTJOHN SWINDLEJOYCESWIND LEPATRICIAAKINGFR ANCINETRIMBLEKERR YANNGRAHAMJAMESMI CHAELGERDNERJOYCE WALKERELISABETHER NSTEINNIKKIBENEDI CTSUSANMCLAUGHLIN CINDYLEEMELLINANN BERNICEDUNCANDANI ELWILLIAMSJANEDOE
Jarlve can you run this method of "name solve" using the beale 3 cipher as it is supposedly full of names. i tried but could not get it right. Alas beale is also probably a great fraud cipher money making scheme set up any way.. but hec ya never know..
Jarlve can you run this method of "name solve" using the beale 3 cipher as it is supposedly full of names. i tried but could not get it right. Alas beale is also probably a great fraud cipher money making scheme set up any way.. but hec ya never know..
Hey Mr lowe,
If it really is a list of names then the multiplicity (0.425) is probably too high in combination with the cipher length and suspected ngram profile. I also considered the same thing as you but I don’t want to work on it at the moment.
@Largo, is that you in the climbing picture? Nice hobby. I saw the documentary Valley Uprising on TV some time ago and was blown away by the larger than life atmosphere surrounding it.
Yes, it is me. The photo was taken some years ago at an old stone quarry (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steinbruch_Schriesheim).
At the moment my spare time is very limited and I have definitely too many hobbies (z340, cooking, climbing, urbexing, photographing, hiking, writing, constructing a new terrarium for my snakes and so on…). So I usually go into a climbing hall instead to real rocks. But I like documentations like the one you have mentioned too (just watched the trailer).
„El Capitan“ in Yosemite National Park is way beyond my skills but it is impressive to watch others climbing it. The most impressive thing (and most stupid) is when Dan Osman broke the record by climbing the whole rock without any belay extremely fast. It is fascinating what humans are able to do. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8e0yXMa708Y
The short break from z340 was a good idea. I have some new ideas and I will start working on them soon.
doranchak could you please link your collection of encoding stats for this cipher (it’s the 408 with 4 random columns removed in a 24 by 17 grid). I wonder if L3 cycles match up with the 340.
OK here are the stats. I’ll refer to yours as j340:
multiplicity:
z340: 0.185
j340: 0.159
ioc:
z340: 0.0193996182543814
j340: 0.0185840707964601
jarlve nonrepeat score 1:
z340: 4462
j340: 4305
jarlve nonrepeat score 2:
z340: 1599
j340: 1537
perfect cycle score (L=2):
z340: 247.85
j340: 522.66
perfect cycle score (L=3):
z340: 62.36
j340: 195.27
jarlve m_2s_cycles:
z340: 2150.72
j340: 2099.83
I’m surprised m_2s_cycles is lower for j340 than z340. It contradicts the larger perfect cycle scores for j340 for L=2 and L=3. What could be the explanation for this? By contrast, Z408 has pcs(L=2) of 884.93, pcs(L=3) of 418.90, and m_2s_cycles of 2855.73.
Full stats are in this spreadsheet, scroll all the way to the bottom: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ … sp=sharing Cipher is named "jarlve z408 with random columns removed".
My other goal this year is described here: http://www.zodiackillersite.com/viewtop … 359#p50359
I hope it could help with figuring out types of periodical transposition.
Me too. I’m just starting to build a large database of test ciphers that include many published by the American Cryptogram Association in their periodical. They publish a wide variety of types and I’m sure several of them are periodical transpositions.
Nice updates to your wiki and thanks for adding AZdecrypt with it. By the way, my initial observation of the period 15/19 bigrams peak was prior to the one you listed. It is in viewtopic.php?f=81&t=2158&start=20 third post from the bottom.
OK – I have updated it. Let me know if this is OK or if you want me to remove your attribution.
FYI if you want to link to a specific post (instead of needing to specify where it is on the page), you can get the URL from the tiny “document” icon next to the poster’s name (i.e., to the left of where it says “by Jarlve”)
This year the „European Historical Ciphers Colloquium“ will take place in Bratislava, Slovakia (May 18-19). Last year this symposium was in Kassel, Germany and I was there and I will defenitely visit the event in Slovakia too. The organizer asked for presentations and I considered to participate. I don’t have problems to talk to the audience but I think I don’t have enough background in the topic yet. All I could do is to share the things that all the people in this forum have found out if no one minds. What do you think David? I could help by exposing a summary of all the clues to the european audience.
I heard about this talk from Klaus Schmeh. It sounds very interesting and I’d love to come but it is prohibitively expensive for me to get there. I will be happy for you to share the clues with them. Jarlve, you will need to weigh in here on if/how you want your material presented.
@Largo, is that you in the climbing picture? Nice hobby. I saw the documentary Valley Uprising on TV some time ago and was blown away by the larger than life atmosphere surrounding it.
Yes, it is me. The photo was taken some years ago at an old stone quarry (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steinbruch_Schriesheim).
At the moment my spare time is very limited and I have definitely too many hobbies (z340, cooking, climbing, urbexing, photographing, hiking, writing, constructing a new terrarium for my snakes and so on…). So I usually go into a climbing hall instead to real rocks. But I like documentations like the one you have mentioned too (just watched the trailer).
„El Capitan“ in Yosemite National Park is way beyond my skills but it is impressive to watch others climbing it. The most impressive thing (and most stupid) is when Dan Osman broke the record by climbing the whole rock without any belay extremely fast. It is fascinating what humans are able to do. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8e0yXMa708YThe short break from z340 was a good idea. I have some new ideas and I will start working on them soon.
What the hell, that dude is literally running up a vertical wall. Have fun with all your hobbies, never heard of urbexing before.
