Experiment 4
The key is a stretch of the solved sections or their ciphertext, not the message itself.
What the method does with the 24 known letters.
Instead of a short secret word, the keythe secret word The word or string a cipher needs besides the method. might be a long piece of text the solver already knows, such as the first three messagesthe earlier messages The three solved parts of the sculpture. on the sculpture. We slide each of those texts along the fourth messagethe message The 97 letters of English that Jim Sanborn wrote and enciphered. in every possible position, forwards and backwardsa mirror Reading or writing the text from the end to the start., and check whether any position explains all 24 known letters. If none does, those texts are not the key, full stop.
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.
A running key is a long text written under the message, one letter per place. Here the text is K1's carved letters, started at its 49th letter, the alignment that came closest.
Even the best alignment gets only 8 of the 24 known places right; chance gives about that many when 165,216 alignments are tried.
Every offset of K1, K2 and K3, carved and solved, forwards and backwards, under all 24 ways of using the table: 0 survivors.
This experiment produced no candidate: the search ruled everything out before a full text was built. Its product is the bounded negative in section 7.
Redo the method on a few letters with pencil and paper.
The same steps run by the code on the real letters.
running key = K1 plaintext at offset 0, all alphabets KRYPTOS, Vigenere
alphabet: KRYPTOSABCDEFGHIJLMNQUVWXZ
pos plain key idx(p)+idx(k) predicted carved
64 B B 8+8 J N x
65 E E 11+11 V Y x
66 R T 1+4 O P x
67 L W 17+23 H V x
68 I E 15+11 K T x
69 N E 19+11 T T ok
Family, key space, the constraint under test, and the clues it reads.
K4 uses a running key: a 97-letter stretch of text the solver already has, applied through the tableau. Sanborn said he left 'instructions in the earlier text that refer to later text' and that K4 'will come back to the first part' (clue register C7). Gillogly guessed running key in 1999; Schridde tried the K1 to K3 plaintexts under two conventions. We make it exhaustive: key sources are the K1, K2 (as carved and corrected) and K3 plaintexts, the three ciphertexts, and the concatenations of each set, read forward and backward, at every offset including wrap-around, under all 24 conventions. Every crib position is checkable, so each (source, direction, offset, convention) is excluded or survives. Bounds: complete for these sources. Not covered: the tableau text, the Morse, external books.
Written before the run; the result decides it.
No source, direction, offset or convention reproduces all 24 cribs. The best alignment matches fewer than 8 of 24, which is chance for this many trials.
Build key texts: K1, K2 carved, K2 corrected, K3 plaintexts (letters only); K1, K2, K3 ciphertexts (letters only); K1+K2+K3 plaintext and ciphertext concatenations. For each, both directions. For offset o in 0..len-1 with cyclic wrap, key[i] = text[(o+i) mod len]. For each convention compare encrypt(p[pos], key[pos]) with c[pos] at all 24 cribs. Survivors are submitted as candidates by decrypting all 97 letters; key_bits is log2(trials).
The harness's record: candidates, gates, loss, and the negative result this experiment leaves behind.
Every trial is decided at all 24 crib positions.
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.