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The Zodiac Ciphers: What do we know? And when can we stop trying to solve them?
1. The Zodiac Ciphers
What do we know? And
when can we stop trying
to solve them?
David Oranchak
http://zodiackillerciphers.com
2. December 20, 1968
Betty Lou Jensen, David Faraday
Lake Herman Road, Benicia
July 4, 1969
Darlene Ferrin, Michael Mageau
Blue Rock Springs Park, Vallejo
September 27, 1969,
Cecelia Shepard, Bryan Hartnell
Lake Berryessa
October 11, 1969
Paul Stine
Presidio Heights, San Francisco
7. Cipher is 32 symbols long
But there are 29 unique symbols!
8.
9. I like killing people
because it is so much fun
it is more fun than killing
wild game in the forrest
because man is the most
dangerous animal of all to
kill something gives me the
most thrilling experience
it is even better than
getting your rocks off with
a girl the best part of it
is that when I die I will
be reborn in paradice and
all the I have killed will
become my slaves I will not
give you my name because
you will try to slow down
or stop my collecting of
slaves for my afterlife
ebeorietemethhpiti
10.
11. EBEORIETEMETHHPITI
ROBE[R]T EM[M]ET THE HIP[P]IE
TIMOTHIE E. PHEIBERTE
I'M HERE TO BITE THE PIE
THE EERIE POET BIT HIM
I HOE THE TIBET EMPIRE
I BETTER HOPE I TEE HIM.
BE HERE. TIPTOE. TIE HIM.
12. EBEORIETEMETHHPITI
ROBE[R]T EM[M]ET THE HIP[P]IE
TIMOTHIE E. PHEIBERTE
I'M HERE TO BITE THE PIE
THE EERIE POET BIT HIM
I HOE THE TIBET EMPIRE
I BETTER HOPE I TEE HIM.
BE HERE. TIPTOE. TIE HIM.
35. When can we stop trying to solve it?
● Someone solves it
● No message to find
● Better things to do
But we want to know the solution, so we keep trying.
Most commonly tested idea: Z340 was made like Z408.
A better question is: When can we move on to another idea?
Possible answer: Generate many test ciphers
36. “Z340 was made like Z408” hypothesis
● Homophonic substitution
● Normal reading direction
● English language
● Possible misspellings
● Omitted words
● Possible transcription errors
● Curious features are random accidents
● Filler
37. “Symbol confusion”
groups
Cipher generator
● Big pile of books
● Take random samples of length 340
● Generate random misspellings, omissions, filler
● Generate random keys
● Measure features
○ Symbol counts, ngram count, appearances of cycles,
prime phobia, transcription errors, even/odd
discrepancy, row randomness, appearances of
specific patterns, filler section, misspellings
● Use multiobjective optimization to find keys with
measurements most similar to Z340
○ Genetic algorithm
38. Sample generated ciphers -
Patterns similar to Z340
Gilbert and
Sullivan
Count of Monte
Cristo
Les Miserables
40. ● Improve codebreaking skills
○ Some plaintexts are harder than others
● Verify that hypothesis can make Z340-like
cipher
● Curious features may be phantoms
● Solving numerous test ciphers increases
confidence that hypothesis is wrong.
Nice parlor trick. But what’s the point?
41. Explore other hypotheses
● Dan Olson’s hypothesis
● Transpositions
● Wildcards/polyphones
● Ngram substitution
● Quadrants
● Home-grown modification to simple substitution
● Error in encipherment method
● And an infinite number of others
42. Future Work:
● Continue collecting observations, test results, and ruling out hypotheses
● Knight/Nuhn’s cipher type detection
○ Obtain/generate huge training set of ciphers
○ Better results are possible with ensemble classifiers
○ Example: “Netflix Prize” won by BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos classifier
● How would Z340 be classified?
● Online workbench: Centralize autosolvers and statistical tools
More Info:
ZodiacKillerCiphers.Com
Thanks to: The many researchers and collaborators in the forums at ZodiacKillerSite.
com, ZodiacKillerFacts.com, and ZodiacKiller.com.
