Experiment 1
Root experiment; establishes the pipeline with the most naive attack.
What the method does with the 24 known letters.
The first two messages on the sculpture were locked with a simple scheme: a secret word is written over and over under the messagethe message The 97 letters of English that Jim Sanborn wrote and enciphered., and each pair of letters is looked up in a table carved on the sculpture. We try the laziest possible secret word, KRYPTOS. We expect it to fail, and the way it fails tells us the checking machinery works: the 24 letters Sanborn has revealed will not show up where they should.
Words in the margin are defined on the glossary page.
The carved letters go in at the top; the reading comes out at the bottom.
The pipeline check. The sculpture's own word, KRYPTOS, repeats under all 97 carved letters, and each carved letter is shifted back by the key letter above it on the sculpture's table.
The reading is nonsense, and only 2 of the 24 known places come out right, at places 31 and 66. That is what chance gives.
It proves the harness: decrypt, re-encrypt, gate, score and record all run end to end. It was never expected to work.
Laid out as the copper carries K4: OBKR ends the line that finishes K3, then three lines of 31. Left, as carved, the 24 known places in accent. Right, the candidate: a known place it gets right is an accent cell, one it misses is outlined. This is the candidate with most known letters right; none passed every gate.
in: the copper, always the same
OBKR ends the line that finishes K3, then three lines of 31
out: the candidate
checked: the known letters in place, and the reading turns back into the copper
The loss of the best candidate, part by part. Zero is solved.
| Known letters missed | 22 of 24, ten points each | 220.00 |
| English | the 73 free letters score -8.28; English text scores -3.6 | 4.68 |
| Key | 6 bits to write it down (key words are cheap, arbitrary letters 4.7 bits each); each 60 beyond 60 costs a point | 0.00 |
| Loss | of 240, the worst possible | 224.68 93.6% |
Redo the method on a few letters with pencil and paper.
Take the keyed alphabet KRYPTOSABCDEFGHIJLMNQUVWXZ. Number its letters 0 to 25. For each ciphertext letter, find its number, subtract the number of the key letter beneath it (the key KRYPTOS repeating), wrap around 26, and read off the plaintext letter at that number. The harness then checks positions 22 to 34 for EASTNORTHEAST and 64 to 74 for BERLINCLOCK. If they are not there, the hypothesis is dead at that gate.
The same steps run by the code on the real letters.
alphabet: KRYPTOSABCDEFGHIJLMNQUVWXZ
key: KRYPTOS (repeating)
pos cipher key (c - k) mod 26 plain
1 O K 5 - 0 = 5 O
2 B R 8 - 1 = 7 A
3 K Y 0 - 2 = 24 X
4 R P 1 - 3 = 24 X
5 U T 21 - 4 = 17 L
6 O O 5 - 5 = 0 K
Family, key space, the constraint under test, and the clues it reads.
K4 is a Quagmire-III Vigenere over the KRYPTOS-keyed alphabet, like K1 and K2, with the sculpture's own name as the keyword. This is the null hypothesis the community discarded in 1999; it is here to prove the gates and the record format, and to show the cribs rejecting it.
Written before the run; the result decides it.
Fails the crib gate with at most a handful of chance hits out of 24; zero candidates pass.
Decrypt K4 with keyed_vigenere_decrypt(K4, 'KRYPTOS', KRYPTOS_ALPHABET). Submit that single plaintext as the candidate. Key bits counted as 4.7 per letter.
The harness's record: candidates, gates, loss, and the negative result this experiment leaves behind.
All 1 candidates, lowest loss first.
keyed Vigenere, alphabet KRYPTOS, keyword KRYPTOS
Pipeline check only.
What was searched, as the harness recorded it.
How this experiment sits among the others is on the lineage page; its family's open hypotheses are on the families page.