Experiment 54
Experiments 13, 28 and 46 tested Gromark keys, a string of digits that grows by adding earlier digits, on tables rebuilt from the puzzle's vocabulary. Here the tables come from every word of the solved messages and Sanborn's 2025 letter, and the test asks first how small a number base the 24 known letters allow, then whether any growth rule fits.
What the method does with the 24 known letters.
In a GromarkGromark A cipher whose secret is a short number that grows into a long stream of digits by adding pairs of earlier digits; each message letter is pushed along the alphabet by the next digit. cipher the secret is a short string of digits that grows by itself: each new digit is the sum of two earlier ones, keeping only the last digit. Each known letter tells us how far the tablethe table The right-hand half of the sculpture, 26 rows of the alphabet each shifted one place further, starting from the word KRYPTOS. had to shift it, and with ordinary digits no shift can be bigger than 9. So the biggest shift the known lettersthe known letters Sanborn has confirmed that positions 22 to 34 of the message read EASTNORTHEAST and positions 64 to 74 read BERLINCLOCK. demand says how large the number system must be. We work that out for tables rebuilt from every word of the solved messages, and check scrambled copies of the copper the same way.
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 Gromark key is a stream of digits. Each known letter under its carved letter tells the shift used there; a shift of 10 or more cannot be a single digit, so it needs a bigger number base.
Over all 10,404 pairs of tables built from K1 to K3 words, the smallest base any pair allows is 17; ten shuffled coppers give 17 to 19.
No pair allows base 15 or less, so the ordinary base-10 Gromark is out on every one of these tables.
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.
plain SHADINGBCEFJKLMOPQRTUVWXYZ
cipher INVSBLEACDFGHJKMOPQRTUWXYZ
place plain carved shift (Vigenere)
22 E F 1
23 A L 3
24 S R 19
25 T V 9
26 N Q 13
Family, key space, the constraint under test, and the clues it reads.
Gromark and its generalisations: the key is a digit stream in base B with k[i] = k[i-a] + k[i-b] mod B (a > b >= 1, a up to 13), applied as an additive shift through a plain and a cipher alphabet (C22(a) reads the raised YAR as such a primer). Every forced shift must be a digit below B, so the largest of the 24 forced shifts bounds B from below for each plain-cipher pair and mode. Pool: the 102 alphabets of 0053 (K1-K3 plaintext words and the C13/C14 words, plus standard and KRYPTOS), three modes. Report the smallest admissible base over all 10,404 pairs, against ten shuffled coppers; for every pair admissible at B <= 15, test every rule (a, b) on all crib triples where positions i, i-a and i-b are all known. Bounds: exact for these alphabets.
Written before the run; the result decides it.
No pair admits base 10: the smallest admissible base is about 18 to 20 on K4, as on the shuffles. No pair admits a base of 15 or less, so no growth rule needs testing. Zero candidates.
The harness's record: candidates, gates, loss, and the negative result this experiment leaves behind.
Smallest base any pair admits on K4: 17; on ten shuffles: [17, 17, 18, 18, 18, 18, 19, 19, 19, 19]. Pairs admissible at base 15 or less: 0; consistent rules among them: 0.
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.