Experiment 74
Experiments 23 and 57 tried masks that only move or pad letters. Scheidt said he masked the English before the keyed step. The simplest masks that change letters replace each letter by the one a fixed number of steps along the alphabet (or backwards, like Atbash). Here every such mask, on the standard and the sculpture's alphabet, is put in front of a repeating key and in front of the self-feeding autokey.
What the method does with the 24 known letters.
Scheidt said he 'masked' the Englishthe message The 97 letters of English that Jim Sanborn wrote and enciphered. before the main step. A maska mask Something done to the English before the cipher proper, such as writing it backwards or slipping in meaningless letters, that is not itself a cipher but moves or hides the letters. that changes letters could be as simple as replacing every letter by the one three, five or seven places further along the alphabet, counting round, or reading the alphabet backwardsa mirror Reading or writing the text from the end to the start.. Every such mask amounts to a reshuffled alphabet, so we try all of them, on the ordinary alphabetthe plain alphabet A to Z in the usual order. and on the sculpture's, in front of a repeating secret wordthe secret word The word or string a cipher needs besides the method. and in front of the self-feeding autokeyan autokey cipher A cipher that uses the message itself, or the scrambled text itself, as the secret word, each letter enciphered with the letter a fixed distance before it., and compare with scrambled coppers.
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 mask changes every letter of the message by a fixed rule before the main cipher. Here the rules are the decimated alphabets: every step size through the alphabet, reading backwards included.
With the message read backwards from A, places 22 and 29 force J and K in the same slot: dead for a 7-letter word.
22 masks before a repeating key, ciphertext autokey or both: dead or at chance, and no word in 668 fragments. The 79 single-check survivors are above the controls but never reach a second check together.
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.
message on AZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCB, carved letters on the ordinary alphabet, Vigenere, 7-letter key
place known carved key slot
22 E F J 0
29 T R K 0
23 A L L 1
30 H N U 1
Family, key space, the constraint under test, and the clues it reads.
Family 2, masks that change letters (C4(a): Scheidt 'I masked the English language... more than one stage', sources/kryptos-workshop-2015-scheidt-transcript.txt, npr-2005-scheidt-sanborn.txt). The simplest letter-changing masks are affine maps i -> a*i + b on a base alphabet (standard or KRYPTOS), a a unit mod 26 other than 1 (11 values; a = 25 with b = 25 is Atbash on the standard alphabet). Put before a tableau step, an affine mask is a decimated plain alphabet, and b is absorbed by the key, so the 22 decimated alphabets cover every affine mask. Pairings: decimated plain with standard, KRYPTOS or the same decimated cipher alphabet, and standard or KRYPTOS plain with a decimated cipher alphabet (mask after the table), Vigenere or Beaufort. Systems: (1) periodic key, periods 1-52; (2) ciphertext autokey with a constant, every lag, key letter on the plain, cipher, standard or KRYPTOS alphabet; (3) autokey plus a periodic key up to 26. Fragments at periods up to 29 matched against words. Ten shuffled coppers. Clue entries: C4(a), C4(b).
Written before the run; the result decides it.
No pairing makes a periodic key of period 24 or less consistent; 25-26 at the shuffled-copper rate; no fragment matches a word; neither autokey form has a survivor with three or more checks beyond the controls. Zero candidates pass.
The harness's record: candidates, gates, loss, and the negative result this experiment leaves behind.
22 decimated alphabets, 110 pairings. Periodic at P <= 26 (K4, control min, max): {'26': (8, 0, 8)}. Autokey: {'1': (79, 33, 56), '2': (2, 0, 5)}. Autokey plus periodic: {'1': (3682, 3723, 4152), '2': (128, 41, 151), '3': (0, 2, 16), '4': (0, 0, 2)}. Word matches in 668 fragments: 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.