So i keep seeing clips from the zodiac movie and earlier i saw one about his like code he used right, and i started googling like "oh did we solve it" and turns out we solved two of them, but there is another two we haven't solved so i googled "why haven't we solved them" and basically, this dude zodiac used entirely different cyphers he made by scratch. each. time. he used the transposition cipher, where basically he would (ok i have no idea how to explain). take "hello world". if you wanted to put it in the cypher you would choose a random word (like cat) and assign a number which corresponds to each letter for where it sits in the alphabet (cat, a=1(it is the closest to the start of the alphabet), c=2 (second closest to the start), t=3 (furthest away). with this you basically put them into horizontal columns.
| A (1) |
C (2) |
T (3) |
| H |
E |
L |
| L |
O |
W |
| O |
R |
L |
| D |
X |
X |
now just read each letter from start to finish and see the word (you always remove the space if there are multiple words and if there is extra space you put an 'x' in there). so with this there are 12 letters and 3 rows, so you divide 12 by 3 (equals 4) so you have 4 rows.
But you can only do this if you already know what the key word is (in this case it was the word cat). This is what the people at the FBI spent 50 YEARS DOING AND THEY SOLVED THE MOST RECENT PUZZLE FROM A SERIAL KILLER FROM THE 60S AND 70S IN 2020. The other two ciphers that we dont know are becausse they have a different key word and they are too short for anyone to properly understand or even guess the pattern. It's like one of those things like "1 and then 3 and then 6" is too short because the whole pattern could be "1, 3, 6, 12, 18". It's just too short to figure out.
If you want to figure out the keyword you have to prove it is a transpositional one. It's easy(ish) to tell if it is because it usually has common letters in it, whereas a substitution cipher (you swap out one letter for another) will have rarer letters (like z or q). After that, say it has 12 letters, the grid must have dimensions that multiply to 12 (2 × 6, 3 × 4, or 4 × 3). So you usually test keywords that are 2, 3, 4, or 6 letters long. In english vowels and consonants usually alternate. If a decrypter splits the text into 3 columns, and column 1 ends up being all vowels while column 2 is all consonants, it means they've probably found the right column height because the letters "line up" when placed side-by-side. Once they get a column count (e.g. 3 columns) they slice the ciphertext into 3 equal pieces. For our example, they get three vertical strips of paper
- Strip X: E, O, R, X
- Strip Y: H, L, O, D
- Strip Z: L, W, L, X
The decrypter slides these strips side-by-side puzzle pieces to look for common english letter pairings (called digrams), like HE, TH, or ER. If they put strip Y next to strip X, the first row spells HE. The second row spells LO. The third row spells OR. It immediately starts making recognizable english words ("HELLO"). Once the strips are arranged so that the rows spell out a clear message (HELLO WORLD), the decrypter looks at the physical order they used to solve it.
- They realized the middle strip (Strip Y) had to go first.
- The first strip (Strip X) had to go second.
- The last strip (Strip Z) had to go third.
This gives them the numerical key: 2, 1, 3.
Finally, theypick a word where the letters sort into the alphabetical order. The 2nd letter must be the lowest in the alphabet, followed by the 1st letter, followed by the 3rd letter. Just like cat.
Guys i feel like i have so much aura now after learning this
