I attempted brute force attempts on anagram retrieval of original message from Morse Code using all 81 letters. I knew that if it was going to work, there would need to be palimpsest and abscissa at the very least. There would need to be some indication to use them with the Vigenere table as well. It is possible to get Quagmire III (the type of Vigenere used in K1 and K2) but you wouldn’t actually need to know that to be able to use the table and since there’s only one G available I used it in vigenere as the best choice.
This gave us:
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palimpsest, abscissa, solve, with, vigenere, and, try, or, try, trust, your, quotes, from, old, dull, iconic-coin, iiiiii
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This gave 3 words that would prove important for K1 and K2 but we were still missing a clue for K3. There are two acceptable methods for solving K3 so far, a route transposition followed by keyed-columnar or a double-rotational transposition. There are no K’s in the Morse code so it proves impossible to spell key so I went with the second method. Incidentally, a simple double rotation transposition is far more believable in my opinion as the intended solution for part 3. I pulled “two” and “rotations” out.
This gave us:
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palimpsest, abscissa, solve, vigenere, try, your, quote, from, dull, iiiiii, two, rotations, turns, dry child
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There are quite a few i’s and the anagram solver I was using as an aid kept jamming up on them so I thought it was quite possible they were the Roman numerals of a list…
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I. For vigenere try palimpsest,
II. then abscissa.
III. Do two rotations,
IV. try lord quorum clues dully.
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I’ve tried different variations to try and find some sensible fourth part but am rather stumped
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I. For vigenere use palimpsest
II. try abscissa
III. do two rotations
IV. could quote null lrrmdyhtry
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I can get it to work up until the fourth part, go figure, but it definitely seems very possible to anagram out a message. For those at home trying to get it themselves, you just have to sort of pick where to start. You can start at the beginning with the original 81 letters or 106 if you count the e’s. You could also try it with my numbered list if you run into the same problem with the i’s. You can see I went with fairly brief words to indicate the steps to take and in my opinion these are interchangeable or easily changed. I figured the message would have to make sense of some kind and be sort of directions or commands to the solver. I think the last words will need to apply to K4 in some sensible way but will probably not make it completely clear. It’s possible that the I, II, or III sections need a little more as well, I went with the least I thought possible.
Also, this is using anagrams. I don’t actually have any suggestions as to how we were supposed to see this. I’m hoping that if we get some sensible, complete message then it will be possible to backtrack through Sanborn’s orginal methods.
As with anything, it’s entirely possible that I’m wrong. I’d like to think I’d not have been able to get as far as I did if I was wrong. 81 letters is a lot and while you can spell a lot of different things, it’s not an unlimited amount of possibilities and even less when they have to include certain things that would make sense for Kryptos.
I like Scrabble but I’m no expert player. I’ll try and find something that reads well and could mean something for K4 solutions but there’s no guarantees.
try dull hymn quote lord curl
old null cult quote dry myrrh
quell drymouth. try dull corn (LOL, my fav)
Try Quorum’s shelled null code?
Try null-coded quorum shells
try dull dull conqueror myth
try my qlu thundercloud roll
try my doctored null qlu hurl
try dud cum horny quell troll
try my dull round torch quell
my truth could quell lorn dry
dully conquer my droll truth
I guess I didn’t realize just how many anagrams there were for this set of characters. Using a standard dictionary with no proper nouns, the anagram solver I’m using came up with over thirty-seven thousand possibilities. From the best I could tell, that didn’t include variations in word order. So I’m wondering if there isn’t a digital way to extract the anagrams now that you’ve brute forced most of it.
One more thing — maybe what you have could be changed a bit. For sure I’d stick with vigenere and palimpsest in part one, abscissa in part two, rotation in part three, but leave everything else a variable. Ok, this is certainly fun, and I’ve posted way too many comments. I’ll go back to what I was doing before you interrupted my day.
We are lucky in a way with the limits we do have. There is a q and a c and an m that must be used in some manner. Without an extra “i” or “a”, the number of possibilities for these words is significantly diminished. I believe I’ll work on Q words as an angle of attack. The number of Q words is small, relatively, and the number that do not require i or a is smaller still. I am reassured that there are u’s and e’s and o’s available, especially the u’s for without these I would likely want to reconsider the feasibility of the idea.
As far as recovery methods, the closest I may have come was using the words/phrases in their orientation on the slabs in sets of two rows. I then started taking every fourth letter but wasn’t quite able to get going. It may be that I had the wrong order or some other aspect wrong. I will examine Q to see what he can bring and will then try and use what we’ve got so far to try and reverse engineer what Sanborn did.
I’m definitely going with Hanlon’s razor on this one.
I think this was your best idea
Hear! Hear!
I think it will have modulus in it. In my opinion, that clock in Berlin works modularly.