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…
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,…
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