Word search gadget
Here’s a fun, but arguably pointless gadget I built as a follow up to the article about ambiguous word searches: Click here to try out the Word Search Gadget You enter a word, click the search button, then the gadget…
Victim name patterns
“EPotts” on Tom’s forum posted this intriguing observation about the names of the Zodiac Killer’s victims: May be nothing but I noticed names like FErrin-EDwards-STein-BAtes-yet only 2 out of the top 100 most common surnames have letters in alphabetical sequence…
Route patterns
Over on the ZodiacKillerSite forums, pi is doing some interesting work investigating the use of route patterns in quadrants of the 340-character cipher. His idea is to split the cipher text into four quadrants, and then rearrange the text in…
Attacking the 340 using genetic programming
Does the 340 cipher contain simple manipulations that have confounded all attempts to crack it? Dan Umanovskis, the skilled programmer who hacked together zkdecrypto-lite, has created a new kind of attack to explore this possibility. Using a genetic programming approach,…
Zodiac Ciphers found on Facebook
Clicking the above logo will bring you to a Swedish thrash metal band, rather than mysterious cryptograms. Nevertheless, you may find yourself puzzling over their indecipherable lyrics.
Word pairs
Here is another quick (and pointless) diversion. As explored in the previous post, you can find words in the cryptograms without performing any substitutions. For example, in the 408-character cryptogram, the word “OUT” appears: And the word “RIDE” can be…
Hidden in plain sight
Many people have noticed that words can be found among the symbols in the Zodiac killer’s cryptograms without performing any substitutions. Here are some examples from the 340: HER TOM Looks a lot like “ZODIAC” FBI TOO GOD BOO is…
Gardner and Penn, Jekyll and Hyde
Between 1956 and 1981, math and science writer Martin Gardner wrote the Mathematical Games column, a series of popular recreational math diversions in Scientific American. Gardner’s gift to the world was to rescue us from the school-borne tedium and fear…
How to crack Kryptos
(photo credit: Elonka Dunin) Thanks to Doc for informing me about this story. Above is CIA analyst David Stein, the first person to crack encrypted messages in the Kryptos sculpture at the CIA, leaving only one message unsolved. Twenty-three years…
New Zodiac Killer forum
Mike Morford recently relaunched his Zodiac Killer discussion forum: His forum was formerly available by invitation only, but is now open to everyone. It is filled with lively conversations on a wide variety of topics, including news, suspects, the killer’s…
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