Did a chess grandmaster solve the 340?
The World Chess Federation in Las Vegas, NV is involved in a dispute over trademark infringement. The web site for the World Chess Federation has a profile of its founder Stan Vaughan which includes this claim: Grand Master Stan’s expertise…
How to know that you haven’t solved the Zodiac-340 cipher
Do you think you’ve solved the Zodiac 340 cipher? University of North Texas professor Ryan Garlick has written a handy guide that you should read. Once featured on the National Geographic documentary “Code Breakers“, Dr. Garlick has studied the Zodiac…
The Most Pattern-Seeking Animal of All
Much has already been written about the dubious content of the recently published book The Most Dangerous Animal of All: Searching for My Father . . . and Finding the Zodiac Killer by Gary L. Stewart and Susan Mustafa. It…
My name is… Manto Mokhenea?
Deborah Silva unearthed these articles from May 1970 issues of the Oxnard Press Courier: A woman claimed to have found the name “Manto Mokhenea” in the Zodiac’s unsolved “My name is” cipher. The name doesn’t quite fit into the cipher…
Read Gareth Penn’s “Times 17” Online
(Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5) A generous Zodiac researcher loaned me a copy of Gareth Penn’s hard-to-find book Times 17: The Amazing Story of the Zodiac Murders in California and Massachusetts,…
Swedes crack Zodiac’s map code?
Crypto enthusiast Nick Pelling recently posted this interesting article about two Swedish engineers who developed a theory about the Zodiac’s unsolved 32-character “map code”. I agree with Nick’s assessment that the theory is ridiculously convoluted, and that it cannot possibly…
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…
Recent Comments