Zodiackillersite.com

Largo wrote:I made a similar observation some time ago (not distance curiosity at all, but region-based symbols). Don't know if it is worth a deeper look:

Reversed_B.png

The reversed B only occurs three times. Two times in the pivot on the right and one time indirectly connected to the pivot on the left if you assume they form a square. I made some tests by replacing the symbols from the pivot on the right with the symbols from the pivot on the left. No obvious observations. I also replaced all symbols of the pivots by one single symbol. Also no interesting results. Maybe I'll give my "merge the pivots" approach another try.

Very interesting observation, Largo!

Jarlve wrote:The observation correlates better with randomizations than with sequential homophonic substitution.

Do you think the symbols missing from the middle 8 rows could reflect that a transposition exists that, when reversed, will restore the expected sequential cycles?

doranchak wrote:

Jarlve wrote:The observation correlates better with randomizations than with sequential homophonic substitution.

Do you think the symbols missing from the middle 8 rows could reflect that a transposition exists that, when reversed, will restore the expected sequential cycles?

No. I consider it nearly impossible.

Generated using borkky's widget that uses Largo's font:

viewtopic.php?f=20&t=3641
https://martinlindhe.github.io/zodiac-widget/

Hi smokie treats & all!

I was just to post and mention I made a interactive widget to visualize your observation about the missing symbols of the central area in viewtopic.php?p=56330#p56330
only to see Jarlve already brought it up here, so thanks!

I find this observation highly interesting. It is plausible the center piece is using one encoding, and the top+bottom uses another.
All we really know about Zodiac's skills is from what he did in Z408. When it was solved so quickly, he probably combined what he knew with yet another step in order to adress the weakness he'd just learned about in the papers.

So certainly he did not reuse his old cipher key.

Assume he creates two new cipher keys. One of them has some symbols not in the other for some reason.
(maybe he was lazy and reused one older unused key and produced one new)

He splits the clear text in two parts, and encodes them separately.
First half with one cipher, the other half with the other cipher, adding filler symbols at the end to produce a neat rectangle.
Then he makes two horizontal cuts, and rearranges the pieces.

This would make one cipher symbol mean different things in different part of the text and by a minor tweak of his existing knowledge, he produced a much harder crypto.

My math is not so great, but I've seen here that you guys could quickly test this with your existing algorithms. Also there is much info on this forum, I am sorry if this has already been tested before.

Anyway - I also wanted to mention you all please feel free to use the software as a skeleton for a quick prototype of other z340 theories, it is a very small javascript program which I believe should be easy to modify to try out stuff. I put the source on https://github.com/martinlindhe/zodiac-widget
(In order to edit: Just download the zip, edit script.js and open index.html in your browser)

The widget itself is on https://martinlindhe.github.io/zodiac-widget/

I hope to do another widget to look more at the symbol distribution of odd/even places in the sequence if time permits.

borkky wrote:It is plausible the center piece is using one encoding, and the top+bottom uses another.

Good idea.

The first and last 6 rows use one key and the middle 8 rows use another. The key for the first and last 6 rows could simply have more substitutions since it is longer. Or as you say he cut up two different encodings/keys and then rearranged them by rows. This would definitably be a solvable hypothesis, something that we can check. Though, the question is, how many different arrangements/combinations are we looking at or do we want to consider.

i have been using az decrypts creation matrix for the last two months using hundreds of different combinations with not much luck but a few weeks ago i used the top 1/3 middle 1/3 and bottom 1/3 in different directions and different order. some column some rows.(obviously not perfect thirds) One of these gave me from memory 36? bi grams which was very high to what i had been getting still no solve but some ok combinations of word structures.
cheers.

Since I'm currently working on z340 only occasionally and don't read all the postings in full, I'm not really in the depths of the subject. So I would like to apologize if I either confuse something or post observations that have already been discussed.

borkky:
Hello and welcome to the forum. It's nice that so many people are working on the z340 solution. Your widget is really great and I have experimented a lot with it. However, I made a small change and changed the highlight color from grey to red.
You're from Sweden, right? I was there once at Långsön Lake near Rimbo.I enjoyed kayaking around the lake every day. Such a beautiful landscape and many kind people!

YourSecretPal wrote:I've also considered that, two keys.
Perhaps the keys are both the numbers off the Eureka Card photocopy.

I really like this idea! That sounds plausible and a clue like this fits the personality of the Zodiac.

Jarlve wrote:The 340 has 10 unique symbols occupying 39 positions that occur only in the first and last six lines

It was only through the image of Jarlve that I realized how astonishing this observation is. Nevertheless, I wonder how P15/P19 fits in. So far we assume that z340 was first transposed in clear text and then substituted. If you combine this with the current assumption that lines 1-6 and 15-20 were encoded with key "A" and the middle (i. e. lines 7-14) with key "B", we are facing a problem: You cannot solve the individual parts separately, but must know both the transposition and the key. If that is the case, I currently have no idea how to solve such a cipher automatically.

I tried P15 and P19 with borkky's widget. Here are the results:



Do you remember my discovery with 48 bigram and 8 trigrams (Shift the cipher one to the right, two upwards, p19 + mirror)? If you send this through the widget, you get a pretty interesting result:



Here are a few small and perhaps insignificant things I have noticed:
- The + symbol appears 6 times in the upper and lower part and 12 times in the middle. It's symmetrical, isn't it? =)
- The "H"symbol appears only in the outer parts.
- The pivots are located in the middle part and do not conflict with the 2-Keys theory.
- Both the upper 6 lines and the middle part have their bigram peaks at P29.

One more thing:
Untranspose P19, copy the middle part (Rows 7-14) and put it into AZDecrypt: It scores relatively high compared to other snippets of same size

Jarlve wrote:

borkky wrote:It is plausible the center piece is using one encoding, and the top+bottom uses another.

This would definitably be a solvable hypothesis, something that we can check. Though, the question is, how many different arrangements/combinations are we looking at or do we want to consider.

It's just a hunch but the process I described should be supported by some observations made in this thread, such as
- the unigram distance suggests the message was cut and rearranged.
- the symbols not used in the middle / top-bottom suggests the use of two ciphers.
also
- cutting the message horizontally was done in Z408 (3 eight-row blocks).

And I want to believe that the process of rearranging and then finally writing a "clean final message" had some minor issues, as noted elsewhere there's a R that looks to have been corrected (a guess is he misread when transcribing from his work copy)