Elonka

Indeed! I have had people call me at all hours of the day and night, usually because they've moved the Scrabble pieces around, found the word "the", and now want to "hand it off to me" to solve the rest. The most common method is literally that, they'll take a cipher, move all the letters around, find a message in English that they like, and then they'll just conveniently ignore all the other letters!

Sometimes they are well-meaning and just over-eager, sometimes they are mentally ill, or sometimes in between. I always try to be kind and let them down gently, or point them somewhere else that they can get more info (sometimes to r/codes, sorry, LOL!)

For the mentally ill / schizophrenic, I think it's part of the disease, like right before a psychotic break, someone can be at that point where they're not sure what's real and what's not. Like if you're peering into the branches of a tree, and you're not sure if someone's sitting in the tree, so you keep peering, trying to make sense of the shifting branches. A cipher can really trigger that, as someone looks at letters and they think it should make sense, but it doesn't, so they keep working at it, trying to see the message on the other side of the words.

Why is K4 so famous?

It’s smack in the middle of the Central Intelligence Agency!

Why is it hard?

Well, it’s short, only 97 characters, and that makes it very difficult to find the repeating patterns that cryptanalysts generally use to take a code apart. It was also designed by an artist, not a cryptographer, so he probably put in some twist that no one else was expecting.

Is anyone close to getting it?

The college-trained folks have been working on it for nearly 30 years, and have not succeeded. So I think everyone’s pretty equal at this point. It could be a trained cryptanalyst who gets it, or it could be someone who comes in out of left field with an idea that no one’s thought of. I encourage everyone to try! What we’re looking for is a message that’s in English, is 97 characters long, and has the words “BERLINCLOCK” starting at the 64th position. Good luck!

Heh. Well, it depends what you're looking for. If you want something that's going to give you solid historical information about art and architecture, maybe his books aren't what should be at the top of the list, though they can definitely give you the flavor of things.

If, however, you're sitting on a beach, you don't want to think too hard, and you just want something that's entertaining and will keep you turning pages, then yes, I'd say his books are perfect!

I haven't put much serious work into them, I don't like the subject matter (ick!).

I generally point people at the work of my associate David Oranchak who has a "Zodiac Killer Facts" www.zodiackillerciphers.com website. I think that some of the messages may be solvable, yes, but will be full of typos and shifting ciphersystems with different keys. But that's just a guess!

My belief is that he intended it to be solved, with an English plaintext that's 97 characters long (and has BERLINCLOCK at the 64th position). However, to my knowledge, no one has ever tested his solution, so it's entirely possible that it has some mistake or impossible-to-reproduce method.

I think our best shot at solving it will be to try to replicate his method of pencil-and-paper matrices that he used for K1-K3, and then try to think like an artist, what might he have done to "make it harder", like by folding a page, flipping it over backwards, or something like that.