ninvertigo

This is something that greatly interested me for a summer a few years ago. I did not get very far with it but, I can give you some advice. Go buy the book "a history of secret societies" by arkon daraul. This was published in the early 60's and zodiac made so many references from this book as well as the images in the book containing the characters he used for the later cyphers. After the first cypher was unlocked by that teacher, I believe zodiac got pissed and did one of the following. Spent a great deal of time studying more modern cryptography, or he simply created a gibberish cypher to prove his "superior" intellect and ability to troll.

I created a program that solved his first one and then scaled it up. I used a quad i7 @ 3.06 ghz and had it crunch against the 340 cypher. This checked varying directions, groups, doubling of characters, repetitions ordering etc etc and crossed them against a dictionary I made of words he used before and some common english words. After about 2 months running straight on my cpu with me checking the logs daily. I came back with jack shit. Anytime I got a "hit" it would kick out the entire decyphered text as well as key and method used. I could get all sorts of single sometimes double words to come out of it, but nothing coherent.

Its my opinion that this is NOT a substitution cypher of any sort. Without a computer at his disposal, and judging by his previous lingo, I doubt he was a genius of any sorts. So this is most likely garbage, or he has some sort of mask ontop of another cypher that without the original key cannot be undone.

Best of luck to you, I obsessed over this for about 3 months and gave up.

You were out rather late down in fountain square a few months ago bantering with me in a Gallery for about an hour. You sir certainly do need more sleep.

For the record, Rupert is a super nice and classy guy with some real ideas to try to get some shit fixed here in Indy... he damned near persuaded me to vote Libertarian.

POP was so awesome, one of the first games I got on my 386 when I got my first VGA monitor... POP -megahit anyone cheat? lol