doranchak wrote:At period 39, do you also find ngrams that are spaced apart by multiples of 13? So strange, all these multiples of 13. And the "my name is" cipher happens to have a length of 13.
I haven't looked at any other spacing or at the number 13 yet, but was also thinking about it.
doranchak wrote:Besides the coincidence with the "my name is" cipher of length 13, a typical plaintext alphabet has 26 letters in it, which produces another coincidence with your observation.
I have also been thinking about the plaintext alphabet length of 26.
I have considered some type of multiple transposition, with more than one consecutive inscription shapes that could put the plaintext period 1 bigram repeats at period 19. One that also causes these other phenomenon that we are looking at. I have played around briefly with multiple consecutive inscription rectangles, and they do move plaintext around in patterns.
Or some type of encryption where, although not a Vigenere step before homophonic substitution, ciphertext is conditioned upon position. Some system that uses the number 13.
I have also considered that he may have just written out the alphabet forward, backwards, forwards, and then backwards again, etc. Then encoded it with the homophonic symbols. But that wouldn't explain the period 19 repeats. Maybe I should consider this in more detail.
The number 13 reminds me of the ROT13 cipher.
I am definitely not ready to dismiss the period 78 unigram repeat spike. I would like to explore these spacing phenomenon in more detail, and it may take some time. I don't want to miss something important. And of course, find the most improbable and compare with other messages.
BartW wrote:Last night i ran through the Railfence cipher 2 to 100 and used
Akdecrypt test the output All scored around 19k to 20k with no solution.
I currently have no plausible answer to the pivots except an angular striping transposition.
Thans David for having a look at my PT idea but i think we can conclude i am pretty much pissing in the wind with it.
Smokie those are some interesting observations
Thanks for sharing
Thank you. I have really enjoyed your contributions and appreciate your participation. I am excited about your findings.
I have experimented with railfence to try to explain the period 19 bigram repeats, using chunks of plaintext with two rows and I think 39 columns. It is the same as using an inscription rectangle that is two columns wide, which is found in some of the cryptography books of the time. But I found that it is very difficult to generate so many period 19 bigram repeats because one message chunk transposed doesn't have any relationship with a following message chunk transposed so that we get diagonal rows of period 19 repeats.
I use my subconscious a lot to work on the 340. Last night I made my post showing that both the leftmost and rightmost symbols of the period 78 unigram repeats shared positions with the period 26 bigram repeats. This morning I woke up wondering if the period 26 bigram repeats were spaced at a period of 78. I got up, checked it, and they were. That was a really weird experience.