Homophonic substitution

[smokie treats]

Well I thank you for all of that work. It sounds to me like the wildcard hypothesis, at least with these symbols, may be resolved. And I am glad to some extent, and will think about it and possibly pursue it some more.

I performed an analysis to answer the question about whether the 340 wildcard suspects could have been used to mask bigrams and that is why they appear in the bigram repeat list, or whether they simply occur in bigram repeats because of their high count. It looks like it is because of high count. Look at the results below, where I compared the suite messages that have high count 1:1 substitutes. All in all, high count 1:1 substitutes account for about half of the bigram repeats, across all of the examples. Note that although the 340 has only 46 bigram repeats, C_S4_P3 has only 52 bigram repeats, and R3_S4_P3 has only 51 bigram repeats. So the 340 bigram repeat list is not necessarily extraordinarily short. It has to do with the message and the key, and maybe with a second step.

bigram.repeat.analysis.png

I probably should have done this first before making the Purple Haze and Tolkien messages, but that's o.k., I learned a great deal. Has anyone ever written a computer program that randomly creates thousands of messages based on different variables, including key, cycling and randomization, and tallies up statistics to compare with the 340? Maybe that could establish some parameters that will give some perspective. I don't know. Instead of hillclimbing the solution, what about hillclimbing the cipher to match 34o stats?

There are cycles in the 340, but they are fractured somehow. I will be thinking of another way that Zodiac could have used a second step, after encoding the cycles, to make the message unsolvable. Some other way of examining the pieces of cycles that remain. There are a lot of symbols. I thought that maybe Zodiac could have used a lot of low count symbols to mask bigram repeats, but that's as far as my thoughts have gone. I see other possibilities.

Thanks again.

[doranchak]

Instead of hillclimbing the solution, what about hillclimbing the cipher to match 34o stats?

This is exactly what I've been working on. Will let you know how it goes once I have anything to report.

[Jarlve]

I tried daikon's symbol expansion idea on suspected wildcard symbols "+", "F" and "B" and came up with something that just might be a 1st stage solve or an artifact of high multiplicity. Some things can be made out "A good man", could possibly also be "A dead man", "by the barn", could possibly also be "by the farm" and some other smaller fragments. Having seen so many solves I found this one interesting enough to share, the consonant/vowel structure of the message is also quite dominant for my solver.

Edit: found a 1955 book "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" which interestingly enough is about serial killers and features escaped prisoners. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Good_Ma ... rd_to_Find

I'm still taking somewhat of a break and will catch up with the rest of the thread when I'm fully rested.

A good man?

Code: Select all

agoodmancessalera
ndbythebarnstopso
ftwithatertoahean
dddiamcontdepropr
inthentasurchfiel
dcoalmeroadeforat
humphbyrailenseas
ternsthewinnewman
atthestorywitheip
remandangeditistr
avolungsanddeltpe
rtimonsoulitsofth
eendthinsullityco
meinasuriesiningi
talsowindgonature
sistemptedassther
oilbasedthemresoa
ffordericedalltod
sheartinginecordi
otaandedetechspyk

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[smokie treats]

I have a question. Has anyone ever tracked to see if there are "hot spots" in the 340 where ZKD seems to find more, longer words? Has anyone ever kept track to see if long words or short phrases seem to appear on certain rows more than on other rows? Has anyone ever added a subroutine that made a list of words found and the positions of those words? I cannot imagine nobody ever having thought of or tried that. Just wondering because of the masked bigrams idea.

[masootz]

from jarlve's "a good man", broken down by recognizable words where applicable, kept in the same order as his "solve". not sure if this is helpful but it was interesting to me -

a good man
cessaler
and
by the barn
stop
soft with a
ter
to a
he and
dd
i am con
tdepropr
in the
nta
surch field
coal
me
road
e
for at
humph
by rail en
sea sterns the win new man at the story with
eip
remand an
g
edit is
travo
lungs
and
deltpertimon
soul its of the end thins
ullity
come in as
urie
sining it also wind go nature
sis
tempted ass the roil based them
reso
afford
e
rice
d
all
tod
she art in gin
e
cord iota and
ede
tech
spy
k

[doranchak]

I have a question. Has anyone ever tracked to see if there are "hot spots" in the 340 where ZKD seems to find more, longer words? Has anyone ever kept track to see if long words or short phrases seem to appear on certain rows more than on other rows? Has anyone ever added a subroutine that made a list of words found and the positions of those words? I cannot imagine nobody ever having thought of or tried that. Just wondering because of the masked bigrams idea.

I would guess that more words would tend to appear in spots where there are fewer constraints (i.e., many unique cipher symbols). It would be interesting to experiment with that.

It makes me wonder about this idea: Areas of the cipher text that contain more repeated symbols are harder to fit words and phrases into. For each position in the cipher text, a measurement of this difficulty can be approximated. What would happen if the hillclimber added an additional bias to an ngram, based on the "density of repeated symbols" at (or near) the ngram's position? For example, a 5-gram that fits into the cipher symbols "ABCDE" is likely to be much less interesting than one that fits into "ABCAC".

[smokie treats]

Yeah, it just seems to me that I have seen more words appear and disappear in certain locations as opposed to others. Row 3 and about row 16 or 17 always seem to have little phrases pop up and then disappear. With hot spots, there may also be dead zones, where word infrequently appear. It would be interesting to know if there is a pattern.

[doranchak]

That's a really interesting idea. With enough test ciphers, maybe there is a way to correlate the hot spots with some aspect of the cipher statistics somehow. If so, then the 340's hot spots might tell us something about the cipher.

[smokie treats]

from jarlve's "a good man", broken down by recognizable words where applicable, kept in the same order as his "solve". not sure if this is helpful but it was interesting to me -

a good man
cessaler
and
by the barn . . .

Thanks for that. Normally I don't take a lot of stock in vague connections. But this is a very dark short story about the cold blooded murder of a family that has gotten into a car accident on a rural road. And it was published in 1953, same year as the Lady Doom comic. The killer's name is Misfit. I will read through it more closely tonight; see if this has ever been referenced before. I'm not an encyclopedia of Zodiac facts, so others may spot something that I don't. It's a pretty quick read.

Here's the text: http://m.learning.hccs.edu/faculty/desm ... 20Find.pdf

[Soze]

I like the fact that the message contains mining (coal), railroad (rail), nature and a good man. The first three are parts of the Zodiac communication in my opinion and all relate back to Theodore Roosevelt; again in my opinion.

Soze