Bmichelle - Thanks for your comments. I do appreciate experimentation. It is good to experiment and try new things. But I have found that sometimes intelligent criticism can be very helpful. I told you my experience. Sometimes we all have to forge our own path and learn from our mistakes. I can only repeat that while I was angry at the time, the criticisms of glurk and doranchak about wide anagram use were very helpful to me. I saw that with the hundreds of possibilities created by wide anagram use, there was no way to tell which were intended and which were chance. When I dropped wide anagram use, my work got sharper. The FBI and police started responding to my factual research in the Tylenol, Zodiac and EAR/ONS cases. Police and the FBI actually did some things based on my research, when before they just ignored it.
I think with omnidirectional twisty word finds and wide anagrams, too many words are created, so we cannot know which were intended and which were noise. I have seen some of your other work, and it is interesting. My advice would be to seriously look at what glurk, doranchak and I are saying. But that is up to you. Did you see the many examples doranchak posted?
Doranchak could recommend some good introductory books on codes. You might also check out his website
http://www.zodiackillerciphers.com . He has a lot of good material on Z codes and other codes. Also check out his webtoy, which allows you to try to solve the Zodiac 340.
This is the 408 which you asked to see. Done on the webtoy. Credit goes to Doug Oswell and Kite for working on this, which I picked up on and expanded. It is based on vertical word finds in the 408 solution. At one time I was pretty sure we had discovered something important. Now I am not so sure. Notice that I do not use omnidirectional twisties. Also I only use correct spelling and no anagrams. Also a key series of words occur in the same part of the code, and several have a nautical theme. WAVE, TIDE, BELL, HEAL, EARN, ROCKS are all key parts of a nautical story involving stormy seas, unrequited love and suicide by Frederick Marryat that we have reason to think Ted K had read and liked. Oswell made that very intriguing discovery. And TED happens in the part about being REBORN. Of course Z said he would be reborn and Ted talked about bursting from the ashes like a Phoenix, a type of rebirth. Kite made that interesting discovery.
Now I still kick around some work on this over at unazod, because it is interesting and fun to explore. To a degree. But I mostly put work on this on the backburner. Glurk and doranchak showed me how, even using my stricter rules of vertical only, no anagrams, ANY grid creates numerous words. It just doesn't hold up as a likely method, because there is no good way to determine intended words from accidental words. I realized it was not the most profitable use of my time. I still think it is interesting, but these results don't rise to the level of proof. These things are interesting and fun to explore. But I mostly put them on the back burner.
They become a maze in which you can literally spend months or even years of your life getting lost in. And in the end, you do not have anything that the FBI, police, newspapers, academics, veteran amateur code breakers or the larger Zodiac research community will respect, because there are just way too many variables.
So you can consider what we are saying or ignore it. Your time is your own. I can only say that for me, the omnidirectional word finds and wide anagrams are a puzzle with no one clear solution, and I am glad that I have mostly moved on to other things, and when I do look at them,
I only consider verticals with no twists and no wide anagrams.
Even with those important limits and restrictions, there is still too much white noise created to have it ever be reliable evidence.
In other words, have fun, explore, but IMO don't spend too much time on it, when there are other more solid areas too explore.
NEW Zodiac 408 Word Finds Ted Reborn CROPPED.jpg
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