Working with the cipher?  Incredible time, incredible life moment.

Sharing it with others?  Brutal, anxiety inducing, not fun.  Too bad.  It just turns into arguments on internet forums, that is just how the discourse typically plays out.  I haven’t heard one person say, “I think the triangle should be scanned” on internet forums, for example.  Which is hilarious to me.  But again, difference of opinion.  😀 

It has been pretty adversarial since day one, more like a battle than trying to share something cool with people.  Weird, but whatever.  Didn’t know how it would play out back in December.

Wanted collaboration but ended up getting met with silence + minimal feedback.

But yeah if they scan it and find something, GG game over I win.  Probably why I have been calling for it so much.

The bickering with bad debunks (for example “Not a CSP”) tends to just derail the discussions in general.  This one started with natural origin being introduced right off the bat.  Perhaps more positive comments would have come along, but typically the bad debunks come first.  The people that actually read it take longer.  Much longer.  By the time they are done checking it out, the debunkers have already expressed that it is probably wrong due to natural origin ect. 

The paper is impossible to read in 5 minutes, but if posted on Reddit the derailments will show up pretty quick.  Once they do, the downvotes follow shortly afterwards.

It just isn’t the right place for serious work to be evaluated, but we know this about Reddit already.

An example of a bad debunk would be things like, “Zodiac couldn’t have made the triangle because he would need heavy machinery”.  I’ve heard this twice, so it is why I mention this one.  They are assuming depth from the image, impossible to do.  So this is why I refer to it as a “bad” debunk.  It is basically a subjective opinion made with insufficient information.  The scan will say how deep it is.  If it isn’t deep, you don’t need a bulldozer to make that shape/size.

Posted by: @coder1987

↑

The experts didn’t have a good method to arrive at a unique solution.  Some of them ignored some of the Zodiac’s instructions regarding this cipher.

The paper it explains it all.

If I’m looking in the correct place, I think you must be referencing such parts of your paper where you say:

“Every prior attempt treated it as a linguistic cipher and applied frequency-based or pattern-matching techniques that are mathematically
insufficient for a message this short. The key insight of this paper is that Z32 is not, and was never intended to be, a linguistic cipher.”

and:

“Most prior analyses treated these accompanying materials as secondary to the cipher. Our approach inverts this hierarchy: the map, crosshair, and hint define the problem’s constraints, and the cipher provides the specific parameters within that constrained system.”

and, certainly, I would not want to disagree with the majority of that – retaining possibly “Most” in the second quote but dropping the “Every” in the first. (I do, however, think the term “crosshair” introduces an unnecessary bias stemming from our James Bond experiences.)

Indeed, the purpose of my early prompts on the other forum were just for this very reason: we can’t solve this cipher using traditional cryptographical methods, but there are still constraints that we can at least explore. My approach was always of the nature of what you call “inverting this hierarchy,” certainly.

That said, when we do set out to “turn it around” in this way, we are inherently required thereby to introduce assumptions. We can speculate on the form of the cipher text, but we cannot know it. We can only hope that are assumptions are reasonable ones. We can’t, however, confirm them to be correct ones.

Thus the assessment of the crypographers that the cipher is not uniquely reduceable to any single incontrovertible solution nonetheless remains, and there is nothing that we can do to either wish or force the reality of this away.

And with that, the fruit of our work gets to be evaluated – if it is at all – on the weight of those very assumptions. Nothing else. …

As an example, as to assumptions, I have consistently maintained that the correct way to proceed is to not deviate into anything we are not explicitly given. Consiquently, my assumption at the outset is that, having been giving a map and a distance from Mount Diablo in inches, we need only the map and a ruler. This is, however, still an assumption.

You, on the other hand, introduce the assumption that we are to ignore the map and proceed having first effected a projection of some kind onto an abstract geospatial context.

This is just one example, but what the experts will weigh here, and ultimately evaluate our work on, is the merit of each of the assumptions thus introduced.

Evaluation, in this sense then – excluding, at this point, the notion of digs and scans – can only proceed to an expression of preference on the evaluator’s part.

Posted by: @coder1987

↑

If you can find any other Z32 proposed solution that includes a codebase, let me know.  My code is the only that I have seen for this cipher.

Z32 was never going to be solved by some manual solver, which is most people that tried.  They needed code, and didn’t have it.

There is absolutely no need for a “codebase” of any kind in approaching the formal constraint approach towards solution, although it may indeed be useful if you’re having to calculate things like projections every time you hit a viable candidate. Dave Oranchak did produce a codebase for Episode 11 of his YouTube series Let’s Crack Zodiac, from which he generated a total of nearly 60,000 (actually, 58,099) candidate solutions, having applied only the loosest of formal constraints and sticking only to Radians (and even millirads) as the unit of angle.

Having obtained the data results from Dave I found that, although I had initially considered coding my analysis, search-and-delete in Excel on the original csv file was entirely up to the task and actually time saving.

After that, it came back to assumptions, as I have said. For my assumptions I primarily proposed the following:

1. That the solutions already in hand (by this time, the Z340 had been added to the Z402) clearly present text in the form of plain speech, comprised in sentence form. Therefore it is reasonable to assume the same of the Z32.
2. The postscript to the Little List letter then gives us the order to be expected by the plaintext – the specification of a particular “radian” followed by a “number of inches.”

Just on these alone, the task of progressing beyond just the radians considered by Dave became trivial: The first word would have to be one of “ONE,” “TWO,” … “ELEVEN” and the last would have to be “INCHES.” As none of the candidate first words have ‘E’ as a second letter, the specification of the coordinates cannot, therefore, complete the cipher. You can do the rest by hand.

Proceeding from here, further coding my efforts would have just been unnecessary overkill. The results, for final checking, could just be plotted on the map to further exclude those that don’t make landfall.

A codebase is only needed in those instances where the complexity of the assumptions require it. It was superfluous in my case, and clearly not considered necessary to many others.

Posted by: @shaqmeister

↑

Evaluation, in this sense then – excluding, at this point, the notion of digs and scans – can only proceed to an expression of preference on the evaluator’s part.

Finally it is, to the best of my knowledge, inescapable that no previous potential solution – not even those that were publicly aired and discussed – has ever resulted in a scan or a dig of any kind. So there is that, also. It’s just not been a thing.