Let's Crack Zodiac - Episode 2 - Bigrams
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- čas přidán 5. 07. 2024
- *** UPDATED: Oct 20, 2021: Sorry for the audio problems. Apparently there was a rights issue with some music I used in the video. I tried to remove the music using CZcams's tools but the result isn't great.
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Welcome to "Let's Crack Zodiac".
True crime meets classical cryptography.
Episode 2: Bigrams
Is Zodiac's unsolved cipher a hoax, or does it have a real message?
Let's investigate some possible clues!
Credits:
Music: Ibrahim, "encounter with a mech patrol unit" / ibr
Music: Albertvvl, "Chariots of Fire" • Chariots Of Fire : Tit...
Graphing library: Plotly plotly.com/
Question mark animation: Greenlit Studio • Rotating Spinning 3D Q...
Babbage narration: Jon Adams www.fiverr.com/jon_the_voice
Forum posts about "period 19" reading method that produces more repeating bigrams:
www.zodiackillersite.com/viewt...
www.zodiackillersite.com/viewt...
this is so interesting, especially knowing that you guys didn't know if you were on the right track to the secret message at the time. The method you showed at 7:50 seems to be the right way to go, but you couldn't have known that at the time! :O
Nice seeing you here
Came here to say the same! I missed this series, and just started watching it tonight after seeing/reading all of the news coverage. Fascinating to watch this particular episode in retrospect.
The big difference is how they ended up splitting it into 3 different 'parahraphs'
Unless he knew 9 months ago he cracked it and wanted to extend the release.
The fact you got 208 shows the lack of understanding by the audience. It is not the solution :-) period-19 was very well known about the Z340, the issue was knowing the transformation Zodiac did with period-19, and that was splitting the cipher into 3 sections, and adding a lot of mistakes in.
This stuff is way more interesting than I would have thought before the news broke. Helps that you made these videos incredibly well and super engaging.
"We won't know until somebody actually discovers it and has it confirmed."
_Laughs in December_
What do you mean???
@@aizuaizu5073 I was quoting from the video, and in December 2020 they actually did discover what the code said, and the FBI has confirmed that is a solution.
Look at part 5 of this series.
@@aizuaizu5073 He solved the code in December
Fr 🤣🤣
Literally has his itinerary planned for another 6 seasons of History's worst show to date......doesn't manifest....goes back to making videos on YT
In all seriousness, the quality of your video is quite good. Love watching those normal distributions appear from out of the data.
Those were fun. I almost didn't include them because I didn't want the video to become TOO technical.
@@doranchak I'm sure glad that you decided to include them. Also, I was thinking that the last 18 characters of the 408 is "IAMTHEZODIACKILLER", but with a different key. However, the circle with the dot and the E would then be assigned to more than one letter in the original message--and this is unlikely. However, it means that I might be becoming sucked into this mystery like the rest of you.
@@GregoryTheGr8ster Yes, this case has a way of trapping people. :)
I'm sure there are a lot of things that could fit the last 18 if you let it have its own key, since only 3 of the symbols repeat.
@@doranchak I think I speak for us all when we say we love the graphics and visuals, they make the video truly great.
@@GregoryTheGr8ster
It may be multifarious. The Ebeorietemethhpiti resolves as a cogent English sentence followed by a German word.
'Meet the HIP riot. Eibe'
Spiral algorithm or skip code.
This can act as a possible identifier when subjected to a 1,2,3,4,5... diagonal up, down, up.. mathematical progression suggested by Lewis Carroll's mouse's tail. 'Temet/h' & also a circular Temeth appear as read Phantoms in this typeset concrete poem 'tail' in a Zodiac contemporaneous 1965 edition of the works of Lewis Carroll.
They also appear in fairly proximal large chunk (confirmation pegs?) 'beorie" ,'temethhp' within the intended final format of the Oranchak/Blake/Eyk 340 solution. As placed BACK into the 340's "Times 17" by 20 config.
Dee appears in the left column and hints at reading/writing codes like Elizabethan Steganographer/Astrologer John Dee.
There we see both Avery and _areth Penn appearing as well Read Phantoms. With an 'is MikeyOH' as a likely joke. Perhaps the later harrassment of Michael O'hare was a real world identifier to the one setting the game?
'Key is Noah' may be a phonetic real world hint too for a later period of employment?
Also a phonetic " No, a double murder hint? "
With all this production quality, I'm surprised you don't have more subs
Thanks! Spread the word and help me out. :)
@@doranchak I will!
Wow he went on to solve it! Amazing
@@doranchak goodluck. Hope your youtube channel will blow out. Hoping you get more subs, and goodluck on your future works!
They just aren't buying "the product" for some reason from History Channel again.....geez
Commenting to help the algorithm accelerate your inevitable growth on this platform. The production quality is excellent, the editing is so clean. Great video, interesting topic and informative content!
From the future... He solves it and that 19 character jump proves to be surprisingly important, just not in that specific way - down one, two to the right!
Seriously, your content is fantastic. Stay badass Dave, love the Zodiac series. I'm going through them all after watching your episode 5 code break. Great job!
This is a GREAT idea for a series. Thanks for all the hard work.
I am so glad I found this series of videos. I have been fascinated with deciphering the Zodiac's message, even trying to figure it out myself at one point. Didn't take me long to give up. This is where having advanced computer skills pays off. Excellent work!
I found this from your recent discovery, this video is an excellent resource for people learning cryptography and the editing is great!
This is awesome to go back and look at since you guys figured out the the “down one, right two” transposition well before you figured out the key.
Been waiting on you to post some more stuff. You're pretty great man. Don't stop
I appreciate that!
Dont stop making these, I'm beyond hype and they're super interesting
well, now hes done cracked it!
This is the epitomizing of looking for a needle in a haystack.
The real mystery is why there isn't a "dave", "david" or "oranchak" in the 2010 Montvale Trail Races results!
Great video as always, David! Looking forward to see more of your content.
this video is so eye-opening. not even watching for the "true crime" anymore just watching because the techniques are so interesting.
I'm loving this new series, having seen your older presentations. The case is fascinating but having studied it for a long time it can be frustrating watching basic videos with tonnes of baseless speculation and misconception.
Thanks for watching! It's hard to find nuggets of facts among all the speculations and misconceptions. That frustration led me to make zodiackillerciphers.com in the first place.
@@doranchak can we share sources
This is so cool! Great quality and can't wait for more.
Thank you!
Hi David! Thank you again for a really interesting and well made video about the Zodiac ciphers 🙂👍
Thanks for watching! :)
Can't believe I missed these newer vids, they're great
Honestly the BEST video I’ve ever seen on cryptography. The above and beyond best.
Just subscribed man PLEASE keep these coming! These are fascinating!
Thanks for watching! Working on Episode 3 now. :)
How the hell did you build all these graphics? Looks like it would take you forever to do. Amazing work.
Very informative and fascinating! Keep up the good work!
Is it possible that it is a substitution cypher, but somehow he changes the key at certain points? It seems like that would he most-likely tried raising the difficulty on this cypher, and used rotating/non-repeating bigrams...
I just made a long comment with my observations. I think there are clues which I have described in detail. The text and clues seem to run in more than one direction. It looks to me like it has to be worked out like a crossword puzzle first. No extreme guessing or the whole system goes to heck. I copied some of my work. Lots of times the needed letter or even word ending is on the line above or diagonally above, maybe below sometimes. I think + is not a letter but is a directional or additional symbol. I don't know if a system like this can be fed into a computer or not.
You might note a number of regular looking letters. These form the base for the crossword action. A key is to GO SLOW, one after another, something like a word search. Eventually even the normal letters will be substituted but they are the framework until the rest is filled in.
Im not convinced he was even that gifted with ciphers. The first one was solved quite easily by amateurs, and then the rest of his ciphers appear unsolvable still all these years later. He was probably also an amateur code breaker (i believe the newspapers of the time had cipher puzzles in every week). He probably just made an easy cipher to start with and then just made up gibberish after that to keep the fbi busy with false trails. He probably finds it hilarious that people are still trying to crack his “code” all these years later.
@@somethingfromnothing8428 I THINK....meaning I don't know.....that the 'unbreakable' Z-340 is probably simple but has an odd key. I have had some interesting results with a method I am using and have posted some findings. I have also been deservedly criticized by those who know ciphers. What I found most interesting is that instructions seem to fill in first. These instructions actually work and if you don't follow them, nothing works. One is that O is kind of a wild card, that the letter "ATOPO" [ATOP O] drops down to cover the O. I get more and more to fill in and make sense. I think some of the characters are also ligatures, more than one letter together. I recently read that this was true of the 408 as well. I don't think the thing is extremely brilliant but I think it is tedious. (In real life I can write more than one alphabet. If I mix up characters, I have in a way, created a cipher though unknown characters can be looked up and identified.)
I can get the whole thing to fill in and make quite a bit of sense all the way but I am still obviously making some mistakes. It is fun to play with using a web toy. Then I wonder if I will solve it and find it is drivel like the 408, "I like killing people...etc."? Anyway, that's not what I am finding but it looks like my findings could be equally time wasting.
Very interesting indeed. Thanks, David!
Wow, good job explaining this. We need more from you!
Working on it! 😃
This is my theory:
He cleverly used multiple symbols for each character to mask the bigrams.
Well, seeing as there are 61 unique symbols in the cipher he would have had to, but I wonder how much of an impact that would have on this kind of pattern analysis. The solved cipher also used a similar number of symbols and the bigrams are still apparent
The intent seems to have been to replace symbols proportionally in order to defeat frequency analysis, with any letter that appears less than 10 times getting only 1 symbol (although for whatever reason he only gives M one symbol even though it appears 16 times) and other letters getting more
Very good and interesting video David! I’ve always enjoyed your reasoned and methodical approach in examining the Zodiac ciphers. From what I've seen presented so far, I currently believe the Bauer solution is probably the best answer we're likely to come up with decoding Z's 340 cipher, but who knows, maybe there’s an even better solution just waiting to be discovered. I'll be watching and waiting for more great videos!
Thanks for watching!
The effott you put into this video is amazing!
This is super interesting and absolutely well made!
I think I know how the 340 cipher works. That doesn't mean I am smart enough to solve the whole thing but I'd like to share observations. The first clue is 272, columns 4 & 6. It looks like a word, L-O-O-C, is there. Of course we think of LOOK. The round characters which look like O's also look like eyes. If we look closely at the characters with dots in the middle, the dots are like pupils and they point our sight in certain directions. Anyway, just above L-O-O-C, in the direction indicated by the dotted "O", is K. Thus the word L-O-O-K is reasonable.
What if other words worked this way? They seem to. As more and more is added, if something does not seem to fit, a proper ending or small connecting word is nearby or in the pattern of LOOC/LOOK. If one is guessing what the various symbols mean, this does not happen. It appears the whole thing needs to be worked through something like a crossword puzzle, step by step. If you guess wrong when something looks obvious, bad things happen right away. There are lots of medium sized words that run diagonally as well. Also, consider + as a space holder. For instance there might be D-O-E + ? Entering S for the unknown in this case makes D-O-E + S, DOES. I have an idea + is not used as an alphabetic letter. I take ++ to mean two letters following whatever. The + also connects vertical to horizontal.
I think when a correct selection is made it proves out by making other words diagonally or vertically. Guessing does not cause this.
If I am right, I cannot imagine how such a thing could have been invented before computers. Ciphers aren't my thing and I am cyber-stupid. (I do have some experience working with ancient texts and foreign languages.) The reason I am sharing this here and now is because I hope there is someone out there with computer knowledge who might understand what I am trying to explain, who might be able to work out a system that really works.
For what it's worth and probably not much, I have had an impression this particular cipher is like multi-level chess. I had that impression before I began working with David's web toy.
I’m watching this series now that you solved it! I was just curious with this video what the frequency of bigrams is if you transpose the gibberish text in the same way you did the real message
Fantastic. Look forward to next video 👍
Thanks 👍
I got it! The zodiac is the zodiac!
Ted Cruz
Hurdy Gurdy Man
Great video, I've been waiting for it! Of course, we all 'know' that the Z340 contains a real message, but it is good to see some logical evidence too!
Thanks! If Z340 is a hoax or fake, it would be very surprising to me. It has a lot of unusual features.
@@doranchak I was going to ask if you ran your 'Zodiac style' ciphers through ZKDecrypto?
Wow I'm blown away by this! Amazing work, please keep posting more. Do you edit video yourself? I love the editing!!
Just watched the "The Most Dangerous Animal" series... GREAT JOB!
Wow. Thanks for giving easier to understand explanations and covering liklihoods. Subscribing now
Thanks and welcome!
Superb video editing. 👍
The last 30 seconds of this video really elevates it, in my opinion.
Running is nothing more than a series of arguments between the part of our brain that wants to stop and the part that wants to keep going
Looking forward to the next episode
Fascinating content. Subscribed!
Hello, quick question: instead of the 19 spot jump, would a 12 spot jump be feasible? Keeping to the zodiac theme?
I presume, this sequencing has been done for a sequential number count like say one through whatever? Good question that deserves a response.
This deserves more views
The power of computers... used intelligently, of course ;-) I hold out hope for the other two, but such a small sample size is rough. They probably contain the juciest details, since he limited them so severely (thus reducing the amount of brute force that can be applied.)
Very interesting you got my attention! Wanna to see more 🤔
the dog at the end is the best part
Amazing, whatching every episode. So thorough. What software are using for the cipher process @9.15.?
Keep going with the series!
Will do. :)
Hi,David! I agree with you! I think it a two steps to decoding the cipher. I think the clue is up across and down, like the Zodiac symbol he put at the bottom. I watched the history channel where the guy solved the top part of it, but not the bottom.l think 18 lines down part. I started to use the same method he used in the video but down ways and saw some words. Starting right side down. Then then top to bottom again.
Normally you don't see plain text in the encryption, wich makes this an interesting crypto.
Great job on solving it !
Another great episode. Keep 'em coming!
I will try. :)
These just came out into my recommendation and I became interested in these zodiac thingy
he solved the code crazy that he would be the one to get it right
Fantastic video!!!
Seven months later I just wanted to scream when you showed that 19 step order 😆
Hi David. How valuable is it to explore his known writing? (i.e. analysis of word clusters / n gram patterns etc.) Or is this pure distraction?
Hey David, I was thinking if there is any reason to stop the analysis only to the bigrams counting? What about trigrams for example? Or what about bigrams with a letter's distance apart? Maybe other interesting patterns will emerge. Just wondering.
Mr. Oranchek, howlong till you crack K4?
I think K4 might be vigenere+substitution but am obviously not so talented as you. What do you think?
here after you solved it ! nice one david
Returning to the transpositions, did you run the other possibilities you described through the key from your solution to see if there was a second message?
Damn they were really close with the 19 symbol jump ahead. Just didn’t split into 3 groups
This Danganronpa-ish music in the background sits JUST RIGHT.
I don't know if I already commented here earlier. I binge watched videos like this during a particularly nasty week of migraine. So I started to play with the web toy. (Thanks, David!) I don't work with ciphers but love words and alphabets.
It looked to me like some parts begged to be filled in like a crossword puzzle. I got some amazing results BUT, the fill-ins have to be done in order or clues are lost. IMO, the 340 reads in different directions; left to right, top to bottom, diagonally from left top down to bottom right. I do not think it is meant to be read in any other directions. I THINK, there is a pattern to know when to drop down a line to continue the sequences.
Some instructions will fill in first. For one thing, what looks like O = something like a wildcard to be replaced by the letter above.
While + works well as E, I think it should also be mostly used as [plus]. Like at the top left, HER--drop down a line-- +B. I know some have made a big deal out of 'finding' Herb Caen there. That is quite easy to fabricate but personally I reject the idea HER +B = HERB because all these letters will eventually be replaced. If you work the thing like a crossword and find a common sequence from the English language, then +, try saying to yourself "plus". Thus we can have HER [plus] B in the first instance. This can be done in all directions I have mentioned, as well as dropping down a line or two. I think it is possible the + functions as [plus] and also as E. I think the 340 is tricky rather than extremely difficult.
If one gets over confident or too quickly applies successes from a previous attempt, it is easy to create gibberish. If the steps are followed in order, more and more sense is made over the whole work.
Some speak of a Caesar cipher. One person on Reddit also mentioned Vigenier cipher plus Caesar cipher. For the Caesar cipher part, I think the + may direct how many spaces to shift.
I work on one end of the thing and see how the other end fills in. A person of interest's name repeatedly fills in. (NOT ALA. A much odder name and clues would also support this name.) I am not looking for a suspect's name. I have quite a bit of experience as an actual Ripperologist (Jack the Ripper) and I know suspects' names should be treated with utmost caution. Still, there are some real interesting things in the plain text that could support this name. Or not. I am far less interested in a name that whatever other drivel may be encoded. I think I will be aggravated if I do work out all of it and it has equal or lesser literary value than did the 408.;-)
Very cool! What I don't understand is that the Zodiac Killer clearly increased the number of symbols per letter in the substitution cipher based on their standard frequency in English to make it harder to use this kind of analysis to test the code. (there far more symbols for the letter E than Z). If you could explain why this sort of bigram frequency analysis still worked, even with those measures taken, I would be very interested! Thanks!
Great video series, I'm enjoying them. I'm sure you get lots of people contacting you with ideas and proposed solutions, I hope you're not sick of them, these videos help. Do you have an email or forum to directly communicate with you or other cryptologists?
I'd recommend registering at zodiackillersite.com. There are several good crypto folks there. And you can reach me at doranchak at gmail dot com.
This feels like a netlfix special i would watch
Hearing about the zodiac gives me chills, it’s so weird and creepy to think that there are people that have lived in this world who kill others for no particular rhyme or reason. You have to wonder, was the nuttiness a product of having a traumatic childhood or did the zodiac develop the serial killer craziness in adulthood
Well no rhymes or reason to anyone else
Has anyone looked into the possibility that more than one character/sign may represent a single letter in the plaintext? For example first sign of the first line combined with the first sign of the second line. Maybe they are shifted vertically or horizontally. Granted this would make the whole plaintext 2x shorter than the ciphertext but then, we only expect to get a name out of it. Great video as always, David!
What software are you using to make the animations in your videos?
Thank you for posting such informative and superbly prepared videos!
And, by the way, is there any single observations resource regarding those "+" symbols occurring much too often as for a homophonic substitution cipher? I know of your general observations Wiki page, but as far as I remember it does not contain any specific section regarding those "pluses". Or does it?
I've been thinking recently of these "+" symbols and one of my theories is that they are supposed to hide bigrams and distort symbol occurrence frequencies. I was experimenting with replacing them with other symbols from their proximity with different algorithms, but to no avail. However, replacing "+" with a symbol present 10 places earlier seems to improve trigram statistics :)
The other theory I was thinking of was that "+" switches symbol substitution rules or modifies the plaintext in some way, say by introducing some offset on plaintext characters like a Caesar cipher does. With 24 pluses in the cipher this would, however, make the cipher rather unbreakable, I fear.
Those are interesting possibilities that would be fun to explore.
It does seem like Z's trying to draw attention to the +'s since they are much more frequent than any other symbol. I do have some + specific observations on the wiki:
The symbol '+' is frequently adjacent (in all directions, not just left/right) to the symbol 'R'. (Source: www.zodiackillersite.com/viewtopic.php?p=39791#p39791). 'B' is the 2nd most common symbol in the cipher (12 appearances), but for some reason it is adjacent to only one of the 24 '+' symbols.
The '+' symbol does not seem to cycle well with other symbols. (That's referring to the cycling of homophones).
"Prime phobia": The most frequently occurring symbol, +, occurs 24 times. Only once does it fall on a prime-numbered position in the cipher text (counting from 1 to 340), against expectations. Also both occurrences of the X symbol fall on prime positions against expectations.
The average of the position numbers for all occurrences of the '+' symbol is 171, which is only one position from the midpoint of the cipher. This suggests the + symbols are very uniformly distributed throughout the ciphertext.
@@doranchak Yes, it may seem he was trying to draw our attention to the "+" symbols. Which is strange, as no symbol should be so conspicuous. So either he wanted to remedy some deficiencies of his previous cipher and it has resulted in this somewhat peculiar frequency pattern, or it is not just a symbol, but rather some kind of mode/cipher/alphabet/direction switch marker. In either case, its high frequency should not compromise the cipher's security - but it may make it mostly unsolvable.
If only we could have some reliable metrics on whether we are getting closer to any sensible solution... But, as you yourself mentioned in the video, even some pretty good metrics like bigram counts can be misleading.
@@peachgrush If the "+" signs indicate switching up the code, maybe he's employing Caesar shifts? After each + you shift a different number.
Between the Mt. Diablo map and the car door, we have the sequence 0-3-6-9 conspicuously brought to our attention. Maybe whatever shifting or transposition taking place is guided by this pattern?
@@Cubodesangre666 I like the idea of 3's. Something about that just feels right.
Who says that the message should be in English. Maybe he fooled everyone and made the second message in code for French, Spanish or another language. So maybe everyone who tries to decipher it need to look at it another way than just assume it must be English
Yes. I keep thinking of the Wind Talkers. And if he doesn't actually speak that language, it might be very difficult to decode. His English is bad enough that he might have learned another language first. Or it could indicate how bad he would be at another language. I also find it a little weird that the solved cipher has so many symbols for some of the letters.
@@adde9506 I think the misspellings were done on purpose
He did make a bunch of mistakes in the original cipher that wasn't too complex so it seems less likely.
@@adde9506 I was thinking the same. He made so many mistakes that maybe English wasn't his first language
Question, the 2 sections that you all are trying to solve . What if they are not separate, but add to the codes you have cracked. In this case the 2 line code can go on top and the single line can go in bottom. Since the code is down 1 and 2 right, wouldn't this change the code and the give a different outcome.
Hey David I have an interesting thought for you. In the cipher solved by the Harden's they made a 3 page work sheet. When I lined it up using the exact image of the original zodiac cipher, the last full line is gibberish once he talks about his slaves for the afterlife. About that last line, what is its purpose? Is it meant to be a key to another cipher or maybe the first line in one of the other 3 ciphers? I feel like there has to be some kind of significance to that final line being gibbrish because it doesn't make sense that he would use different styles for each key. There must be some sort of connection.
I will try to answer that in the next episode which will be about the first cipher. I think the last line is filler, made to even out the 3 parts, but it is still an open mystery.
It is not to even it out. Just as there were two of three identical Bates Letters with one different, there are two of three portions of the Z408 with formatting the same and a complete solution. The third has a subtle solution to offset the formatting and increase it to 137.
The Desktop Poem has three eight letter words. Going down two begin with the letters "SP" and one does not. Going up, two have double letters of "LL" and "PP" and one has no double letters.
The Z13 has the middle five character sequence such that forward or reverse then there will be a third difference unless something equating to one on a clock face were added to the beginning or end of it.
The Halloween Card has three six word phrases with each beginning:
"I feel..."
"You ache..."
"And so..."
Two of the three are similar in structure and verb connotation. The third is completely different.
There's this woman, I don't remember her name. She's part of the group that contributed to the kryptos solve - I think. I could be wrong. But I loved what she said to someone who was asking her for her opinion, she seems to be of some importance and is sought out for her work. She said something to the effect of, you can't really do the solve unless in some part you are trying to put your self in the mindset of the encipherer.
I think about this a lot. I think if I were making this puzzle, what would I do?
If I were making a second puzzle, after my first. I might make the first, fairly ez,...considering. Then when I make the second, I would make it harder, on purpose. One thing I might do, is add an extra layer of complexity. Perhaps even to just one particular section. Especially a section , that I would be challenging you the adversary to decipher, to try to figure me out. The question is, how would I do it?
This is fascinating. I'm wondering if you could make a video comparing the zodiac code with enigma. Was Turing's banburismus method ever applied to zodiac? Is it a coincidence that zodiac and enigma have the same number of letters?
Hey this is so nicely presented.
Is there any video where you talk about the message perhaps being connected to the later messages he sent. Im specifically talking about the paradice slaves by gun by knife by rope by fire etc ... Im surely not the only one the sees some kind of connection with the letters of paradice slaves sort of matching verticaly and horizontaly in the center being the A and the four "BY" that show up if you split the cipher in 4... Now we certainly tend to see what we like to see ... It could make sense that he sent a hint when noone solved it eventually. What are the chances of 4 "BY" ending up in each quadrant of the text in a million examples ? Or how he says ParadiCe and SlaveS some letters fit quite nicely that you end up thinking he sent this on purpose as some kind of hint. im rambling on now... sorry
Anyways as i said is there some video you talk about such a connection ?
cheers
That would be interesting. The idea of breaking the solve in 4's is also interesting. One wonders how you would do that though.
What are bigrams like for the FBI lines 1-3 and lines 11-13 rearrangement?
This is awesome
Hi David, may I ask which software did you used to simulate it.
What are the chances of the cipher not containing the word "Zodiac"? The bottom line seems to have the word zodaik/zodiac , A black triangle = D , A = I , I =A and K = C , but I doubt it's that simple!
It's a tricky question to answer, because we'd have to generate all the combinations of symbols that would make people think "this looks like it says Zodiac". Here's a sample from a talk I gave: i.imgur.com/uMWE26V.png
The upshot is that the pattern in 340 has a 1 in 150 million chance of appearing at random. But when including all those variations it goes to 1 in 30,000. More likely but still a little rare. But, it's still pretty subjective. The "signature" does feel intentional though.
I wish I was smart enough to understand that image. I'm not. From a psychological position though, I feel like this was a narcissist that could not resist putting that there. As a a crib. It would almost be funny, put the end, at the beginning, and the beginning at the end. The Alpha and the Omega.
Is there something significant about moving 19 spaces specifically? Why not 17? Or 21? And i understand that by moving 19 spaces that moves it to one row and two spots over but that's based on the number of characters in the first (and every) row. What if each row had less characters? Would you still move 19 spaces or would you move whatever number you need to in order to put you one row down and two spots over? Or is that just one out of billions of ways to try to decipher the code and the one that happened to work?
Hi Dave, I know I am a bit late to the party but I am finding these videos interesting and its left me with a question after watching this episode. In the first epidose, you showed the Key that was developed to solve the first cipher. Now in this video your talking about using bigrams to prove that a cipher is a real message vs gibberish. In that first key, multiple symbols could represent a giving letter. If that is the case wouldn't any possible bigrams be obscured in the fine cyphered message making this sort of analysis of the message pointless?
Good question! So, yes - because common letters can be replaced with more than one cipher symbol, some of the repetitions are hidden. But some patterns are so frequent, that they still repeat even after encipherment. For example, LL in the 408's solution shows up 12 times. In the 408 cipher, the bigram "filled square" and "B" shows up 6 times. So the original 12 repeats don't all show up together any more but are still showing up with certain symbol combinations. Those repeats end up being important to analyzing the cipher.
hey David, have you seen the proposed solution that finds Paradice/Slaves and By Fire, By Gun, By Knife, By Rope in this cipher? do you think that it is possible that it could be the intended message here?
Is it the one where the words are arranged like a crossword? I think it's an interesting idea but hard to verify, because I think many combinations of words could fit in a crossword arrangement. It's hard to know which combination is right.
Great video
I don't think Zodiac went through too much effort to add too many more steps to cracking this. Maybe one extra step... but I don't think two or more steps. Is there a way your web deciphering tool can rearrange the cipher so we can dig a little deeper?
Not yet but check out some of the other software tools: zodiackillerciphers.com/wiki/index.php?title=Software_Tools
Some of them have the ability to play with different rearrangements.
@@doranchak Cool, thanks
This was smart. Let me get an interview dave!
Is that going up and down and diagonal also ?
It works again! Thank you!
I re-uploaded a fixed version here: czcams.com/video/WN3wT9atYHw/video.html
One possibility, is that he created a OTP using a TRNG. Choosing symbols from dice rolls to construct the pad. Then used it to encrypt a small message that has nothing to do with the case.
That's possible. Hopefully he didn't do that because then the plaintext can't be recovered, unless someone finds the key or gets lucky and discovers the process he used to generate it and it's reproducible.
What a great episode
If you're watching now, then I must say: It's been deciphered!
Now i know that the quarantine bought up good things too. Solving the zodiac message
Hi David! I subscribe. I have a question to see what you think, is there a way to contacting you?
Really enjoying this series but this video seems to have been removed. I can not access it on ANY device.
I re-uploaded a fixed version here: czcams.com/video/WN3wT9atYHw/video.html
Could there be something to the symmetrical dashes that begin and end the tenth line? They certainly draw attention to that line as though it has a special significance. Perhaps the cipher is like a mad magazine fold in and that line is where you fold to make the two ends meet. Afterall, I believe Alfred E Newman (the mad mascot) was a proposed solution to another cipher that allegedly revealed Z's name.
I like the one that pops up the word "SPY" in the ninth line with "P" centered in ninth column and "Z" symbol centered under the letter "P"...
SPY
(+)
I recently had a realization: the Zodiac Killer and DB Cooper were in fact Jimmy Hoffa all along.
Hahaha
Has anyone looked at phonetic substitutions for bigrams and deliberate misspellings? Isn't his plaintext messages riddled with these features?
Using the organized symbols shown in the video at 10:30, I pulled up Excel and started working. There are 63 unique symbols. Inspecting symbol frequencies, "+" is far and away the most common. The thing is, + is much more common than even the most common English letter, E, is encountered relative to its own peers. What do you make of this discrepancy?
I don't know. + looks like a cross though. Wasn't there a cross in the zodiac insignia?