Zodiackillersite.com

doranchak wrote:Great work, Jarlve. I am glad to hear you are still working on ruling out different encipherment schemes. My talk will be about this topic, so I'm wondering if I should pay closer attention to your progress.

It occurs to me that maybe we should track your progress on this very neglected section of my wiki: http://zodiackillerciphers.com/wiki/ind ... variations

Would you be interested in cataloging your attempts there, and possibly posting links to your test ciphers? I could create a wiki account for you.

Certainly, sounds like a wonderful opportunity and looking forward to it.

OK - I sent an email with the login info.

Thanks!!

I asked doranchak to remove my wiki account. It didn't feel right to me.

However, cataloguing my work on the Zodiac 340 cipher is a great idea and I will make a thread here, serving as a catalogue. Presenting my work in a new format, including clear descriptions and details about the tests done. An update on my solver AZdecrypt is also in the works, I hope to improve results for some of the ciphers it has been struggling with.

Thanks, Jarlve. I am looking forward to your catalog of test results.

But this cipher has been conclusively solved? The blurb on the World Chess Federation site includes a blurb that says conclusively, that you solved it. Then when I read your thread you say, "well, I am not an expert, this is what I came up with and its NOT CONCLUSIVE." I understand wanting to have a concise body of information to back it up, but making that claim without coming forward immediately with a solved cipher- well, loads of people have done the same and came up with nothing. If you claim something, I would expect it to be backed up immediately, and the information already ready to present. A claim without proof is just a claim, yes? Why would anyone claim such a thing without their sources and work already in order? I don't get it. Its the claim that it has been solved that rankles me. I would at least suggest not flying that flag til you earned that territory.

Having said that, if anyone would solve something like this, I would expect someone like a chess master to be able to do it. Its just that the word "solved" in the context of this case is, well, pretty freaking huge, not to be taken lightly.

Something that I thought of is that the bigram repeat @ period 15 (340 mirrored) and 19 can be seen as a legal chess move by the knight piece. Or that the 340 is possibly using a "Knight's tour" transposition matrix. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight%27s_tour

This "Knight's Tour" encipherment scheme is mentioned in Helen Gaine's "Elementary Cryptanalysis" first published in 1939.



Curiously, another book with the same title by Sinkov claims that Gaines' book was the only other one on cryptanalysis available in English in 1966. Considering that there are many other books on the subject mentioned here, I wonder what is meant? Was Gaines' book the most well-known?



Here's an example of a Knight's Tour cipher:

Jarlve:

Please excuse my ignorance on the decipherment topic. I've been trying to follow the discussions, but there is a bit of a learning curve. Assuming your hypothesis on the knight's tour transpo matrix is correct, have any attempts been made to break down the 340 into 4-8x8 grids (chess board dimensions) with 1 column and 4 rows as filler? This would fit with the Halloween card cross with the four different sections.

Jarlve wrote:Something that I thought of is that the bigram repeat @ period 15 (340 mirrored) and 19 can be seen as a legal chess move by the knight piece. Or that the 340 is possibly using a "Knight's tour" transposition matrix. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight%27s_tour

@Barry S.,

Not that I know of but there's so many ways, so many things... you can reconfigure the cipher in 340! unique ways (transposition wise). That's a number with 715 digits. So we go were our nose is. I wanted to leave this theory here because it seemed interesting (in relation to the bigram thing and also in relation to the claim of GM S.V.) for anyone who wants to work on it and I may work on it in the future if our current road leads to a dead end.

Jarlve wrote:@Barry S.,

Not that I know of but there's so many ways, so many things... you can reconfigure the cipher in 340! unique ways (transposition wise). That's a number with 715 digits. So we go were our nose is. I wanted to leave this theory here because it seemed interesting (in relation to the bigram thing and also in relation to the claim of GM S.V.) for anyone who wants to work on it and I may work on it in the future if our current road leads to a dead end.

Alright, I'll play with it. Already there seems to be some interesting clumping of symbols applying the "knight's tour" to the top left corner (excluding the top row and middle column of the 340 as filler).