The Spaghetti Incident

Zodiac’s cryptogram symbols made a surprise appearance on The Spaghetti Incident, an album from the hard rock band Guns N’ Roses: It contains a valid message. Hint: Use the 408’s key. Click here to see a forum post with more…

2013 Cryptologic History Symposium

I had the pleasure of attending this year’s Cryptologic History Symposium, held on Oct 17 and 18 in Laurel, Maryland. The event is organized every two years by the non-profit foundation that supports the NSA’s National Cryptologic Museum. – Crypto…

Try, try again

From an upcoming natural language process conference in Seattle comes this paper from UC Berkeley: Decipherment with a Million Random Restarts. In the paper, Berk-Kirkpatrick and Klein investigate the effectiveness of the “expectation-maximization algorithm” (EM) when it is used to…

BTK word puzzle analysis

Below is contributor Chris Klein’s interesting analysis of the BTK word puzzle. He breaks down the overall puzzle into three smaller puzzles that are suggested by the appearance of clean breaks between major words and the placements of the letter…

High resolution map cipher

Deborah Silva recently purchased from Tom Voigt a police photograph of the map code letter the Zodiac Killer mailed to the SF Chronicle on June 26, 1970. She generously shared this high quality scan of the photograph: (Click to enlarge)…

New Scientist

The May 21, 2011 issue of New Scientist ran a feature called “Uncrackable Codes”, which featured MacGregor Campbell’s summaries of eight famous unsolved mysteries: Somerton Man, Beale’s buried treasure, the MIT time-lock puzzle, Kryptos, the Voynich Manuscript, Enigma, Elgar’s unread…

Mountain of evidence?

Audrey Cooper, managing editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, recently tweeted this: The thickness of that stack of papers suggests lengthy and convoluted attempts to justify the claimed solution. It’d be interesting to know what approach the solver took. In…

My Name Is… Sarah The Horse?

The 13-character cryptogram mailed by Zodiac on April 20, 1970 to the San Francisco Chronicle remains unsolved, despite many attempts to find solutions that fit into the cipher text. Did Zodiac really encipher a name in this letter? If we…

BTK word search

Like Zodiac, serial killer Dennis Rader, also known as BTK, taunted police and newspapers with letters boasting of his crimes. Among the many correspondences was a word puzzle Rader sent to Wichita television station KAKE on May 5 of 2004…

Zodiac at the ACL 2013 conference

The Association for Computational Linguistics held its 2013 conference in Bulgaria earlier this month. Computational Linguistics is the study of how to apply computer science to problems involving language and speech. It’s a very broad subject, which also includes studies…