I am attempting in this post an explanation to the high frequency of the "+" symbol by presenting a theory on the nature of the z340.
In this theory, the z340 is not a cipher and does not intrinsically contain a message. The "+" symbols are the only significant elements of the z340. Together, they act as a stencil to be applied on a grille cipher (here is a description of what a grille cipher is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grille_(cryptography) ). In other words, the z340 must be superimposed on a specific piece of text in such a way that each "+" will be applied on a letter of that text. Reading all 24 of these letters will reveal the hidden message.
Supposing this theory is correct, the rest of the z340 could actually still contain a message or it could be insignificant filler.
In the diagram below, I circle in blue all the "+" symbols in the z340. This set of circles will become my stencil.
When testing this idea out, in order to determine if a series of 24 letters is possibly meaningful, my quality criteria are:
- Use all the letters.
- Form complete and proper words with little to no errors.
- Form a proper sentence.
- Read the letters in a systematic or organized way, i.e. reading the letters should be done in a flow and not at random. In other words, 2-D anagramming is not acceptable.
To test this theory, the first piece of text that came to mind that is easily useable is the z408 solution. I tried to apply the z340 "+" stencil in all possible positions and orientations on the z408 solution but only obtained gibberish.
I then tried to split the z408 solution in the original 3 pieces of size 17x8 letters. While testing out possibilities with these 3 pieces, I had a flash about the Halloween card. Since one piece contains the word "paradice" and another contains the word "slaves", I placed the "paradice" piece perpendicularly to the "slaves" piece and aligned them at the "A" letter of "slaves". I placed the 3rd piece in order to complete the rectangle. Here is what this new z408 solution looks like:
With this disposition, the number of ways to place the full stencil is very limited. By rotating the stencil by 180 degrees and placing it at the top, I immediately saw the word "eyes" pop-out in the top-left corner. I then started to collect all the 24 letters pointed to by the stencil in that position. After a few minutes of playing with these letters, I could make out an intelligible sentence. The diagram below shows how to read the letters. Here are some notes regarding the diagram:
- All 24 letters are encased in the stencil's blue circles.
- The order in which letters should be read in a word is indicated by blue arrows.
- All words are boxed in red rectangles.
- The order in which words should be read in the sentence is indicated by red arrows.
- The sentence starts with the word "I".
With some punctuation added, here is the sentence:
"I let my eyes forget her sin", RH
The last 2 letters, that I interpret as initials, could be "HR" or "RH".
A few things I find interesting about this sentence:
- It meets all the criteria I stated above.
- It starts with "I", which I find very fitting for a zodiac correspondence.
- It ends with the letters RH, the same initials as the desktop poem. The initials are composed of 2 contiguous letters in the plaintext and not 2 loose letters that didn't fit anywhere else.
- It mentions "eyes", a topic strongly tied to the Halloween card.
- I find it has a poetic and ominous tone which, again, I find very fitting for a zodiac correspondence.
Of all the ways to apply the z340 stencil to the z408, this is by far the best result I got. There might be other non-zodiac bodies of text this template could be applied to but then the possibilities become endless, unless a hint can point us to the right text. But, to be frank, I kind of like this solution.
_pi
