Dan Olson's idea was to take lines 1 and 11, and write them next to each other to form a new line of length 34.
Then take lines 2 and 12, and write them next to each other to form a new line of length 34.
Then take lines 3 and 13, and write them next to each other to form a new line of length 34.
He thinks the message is in those new lines, rather than the rest of the cipher.
So, I wanted to look at all of the different unique ways to perform these operations. Perhaps we should combine lines 1 and 13, 2 and 12, 3 and 11. That's one of 720 possible ways to make selections of those 6 lines.
Then I thought, we should add more variety. After selecting line 1, say, let's write it down backwards before combining it with another line.
Even more variety: Instead of just writing two lines next to each other, why not interleave them? Such as this:
Before: ZODIAC CIPHER
After: ZCOIDPIHAECR
So I generated cipher texts for all possible combinations of these choices. Download here:
http://zodiackillerciphers.com/dan-olso ... ons.txt.gz (3.3MB gzipped)
The downside is that there are 368,640 total variations based on the above approach.
Here is how to interpret the entries in the file:
- Code: Select all
[5 true 4 true true] [3 true 2 true true] [0 false 1 true true]
RF8B;&(+c.BMF45T|5N*+|#JyRSl9c6<z2OJKHMzT#bLp)B(YWDG|ZEUt+5M/cR:+yUBH)EfRK>*p<l.^YVWPDk%|O1#L(TBG+2pdN
There's an array of row choices: C = [0,1,2, 10,11,12]. These correspond to the "zero-repeat" rows (lines 0-2, 10-12, where numbering begins at row 0).
[5 true 4 true true] <== [line1, do reverse?, line2, do reverse? do interleave?]
So, 5 means 5th element of C which is 12. 4 means 4th element of C which is 11.
5 true <== means reverse line 5
4 true <== means reverse line 4
Then, the last true means to interleave the lines instead of just copying them next to each other.
Because there are so many ciphers, I'm going to check bigram statistics to see if any permutations seem more promising than others.