Experiment 17

“A running key read off the sculpture: the carved tableau, the Morse, and the whole right-hand panel”

Key sources are the sculpture's own carved texts rather than the K1-K3 solutions: the tableau read by rows and by columns, the Morse plaintexts, and the four ciphertexts as one panel. Family 1 re-entered with a new key source, as its parked status requires.

revertedstatus
experiment 4parents
59 stime, all phases
0candidates
0/24known letters
1

The experiment method

What the method does with the 24 known letters.

A running keya running key A secret word as long as the message, taken from a book or another text. is a long text used as the secret, one letter per message letter, so the keythe secret word The word or string a cipher needs besides the method. is as long as the messagethe message The 97 letters of English that Jim Sanborn wrote and enciphered.. The designer said the keys were hidden at the sculpture. The sculpture carries plenty of text: the big tablethe table The right-hand half of the sculpture, 26 rows of the alphabet each shifted one place further, starting from the word KRYPTOS. of shifted alphabets, the Morse code messages on the stones outside, and the three solved messages. We slide each of those texts along the fourth message at every possible starting point and ask whether any position explains all 24 known letters.

Words in the margin are defined on the glossary page.

1.1

The method at work

The carved letters go in at the top; the reading comes out at the bottom.

OBKRUOXOGHULBSOLIFBBWEASTNORTHEASTOTWTQSJQSSEKZZWATJKLUDIAWINFBBERLINCLOCKWGDKZXTJCDIGKUHUAUEKCARIN: THE COPPER, ALL 97 LETTERS, THE 24 KNOWN PLACES IN ACCENTthe key: the carved table read row by row, from its 7th letter (the closest alignment, one way of using the table)SABCDEFGHIJLMNQUVWXZKRYPRYPTOSABCDEFGHIJLMNQUVWXZKRYPTYPTOSABCDEFGHIJLMNQUVWXZKRYPTOPTOSABCDEFGHIthe key letter each known place needsRDUMRIYWOYNKYELYOIECBAQK4 of 24 match at the closest alignment; the run needed all 24matchesdoes notOUT: NO READING; NO ALIGNMENT OF ANY SCULPTURE TEXT FITSEASTNORTHEASTBERLINCLOCK
the key row

A running key is a long text written under the message, one letter per place. Here the text is the sculpture itself: the carved table by rows or columns, the Morse phrases, and the four ciphertexts as one panel, each forwards and backwards.

the check

At every starting point, each known place needs one particular key letter. Drawn for the table by rows under one way of using it, at the best of 781 starts: 4 of 24.

the bound

162,912 trials across all sources, starts and 24 ways of using the table: none comes within three of the 24.

2

Best candidate against the known letters

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.

3

Walkthrough, by hand

Redo the method on a few letters with pencil and paper.

  1. Take the tableau read row by row: KRYPTOSABCDEFGHIJLMNQUVWXZKRYP, then RYPTOSABCD..., and so on.
  2. Choose an offset, say 0, so key letter 1 is K, key letter 2 is R, and so on.
  3. Position 22 of the message is E; its key letter is the 22nd letter of the text, H.
  4. Under the sculpture's alphabet and Vigenere, E shifted by H should give the carved F; it gives something else, so count one mismatch.
  5. Do this for all 24 known letters.
  6. Slide the offset by one and repeat, through the whole text, forward and backward, under each way of using the table.
the worksheet: the first steps by hand, on squared paper
THE TABLE READ BY ROWS AS A RUNNING KEY: WHAT EACH KNOWN PLACE NEEDS AND WHAT THE KEY GIVESplaceknowncarvedkey neededtable letter22EFRU23ALDV24SRUW25TVMX26NQRZ27OQIK28RPYR29TRWYStart the table's first row under place 1.The key letter needed at a place turns itsknown letter into its carved letter on theKRYPTOS table.Slide the table one letter and redo thecolumn of ticks. A running key that workedwould tick all 24 known places at onestart.
4

Worked example, generated

The same steps run by the code on the real letters.

key text: tableau rows, offset 0, KRYPTOS alphabet throughout, Vigenere

key text begins KRYPTOSABCDEFGHIJLMNQUVWXZKRYPRYPTOSABCD...

pos  plain  key letter  E+key  carved  match
 22    E        U         S      F     no
 23    A        V         P      L     no
 24    S        W         P      R     no
 25    T        X         Y      V     no
 64    B        O         G      N     no
 65    E        S         L      Y     no
5

Hypothesis, for a cryptanalyst

Family, key space, the constraint under test, and the clues it reads.

Scheidt: 'the keys were concealed at the sculpture' (C6); the Morse and the tableau are the texts concealed there in plain sight (C9, C25). 0004 slid the K1-K3 plaintexts and ciphertexts past K4 under 24 conventions and found nothing. Here the sources are: the carved tableau as 26 rows of 30 letters plus the extra L, read row by row and column by column; the left-hand index column plus the rows; the seven Morse plaintexts as carved and in reverse order; the right-hand panel's four ciphertexts as one 869-letter text; each forward and backward, at every cyclic offset, under the 24 conventions, scored by crib mismatches. Zero mismatches is a survivor and is decrypted; one or two mismatches are reported for the one-letter-error reading (C17). About 200,000 trials; chance survival per trial is 26 to the minus 24. Bounds: complete for these sources.

6

Prediction

Written before the run; the result decides it.

No source, direction, offset or convention explains all 24 known letters. The best trial has no fewer than 5 mismatches, which is what chance gives among 200,000 trials. Zero candidates pass.

7

Method

  1. Build the key texts from data/site_texts.json and the K1-K4 ciphertexts, letters only.
  2. For each text, each direction, each convention and each cyclic offset, encrypt the 24 known plaintext letters with the key letters at their positions and count mismatches against the carved letters.
  3. Keep the best few trials.
  4. Decrypt and submit any zero-mismatch trial.
8

Result and bounds

The harness's record: candidates, gates, loss, and the negative result this experiment leaves behind.

0candidates returned
0passed every gate
0/24known letters, best
–lowest loss
nonechampion before

162912 trials; 0 zero-mismatch survivors; 0 trials with three or fewer mismatches.

What was searched, as the harness recorded it.

family
running key from the sculpture's own texts
sources
tableau rows fwd
781
tableau rows bwd
781
tableau rows with index column fwd
807
tableau rows with index column bwd
807
tableau columns fwd
781
tableau columns bwd
781
morse as carved fwd
80
morse as carved bwd
80
morse reversed order fwd
80
morse reversed order bwd
80
right panel ciphertexts K1-K4 fwd
865
right panel ciphertexts K1-K4 bwd
865
conventions
24
offsets
all cyclic
trials
162,912
fewest mismatches
more than 3
trials with at most 3 mismatches
none
survivors
0

How this experiment sits among the others is on the lineage page; its family's open hypotheses are on the families page.

Rendered from the record on 2026-10-18 12:26 UTC; updated after every experiment.
view on GitHub