Experiment 75
The six doublets are the copper's strangest local feature. A doubled letter could be a filler, a letter written twice or a null. Three of them sit inside the known stretches and carry different known letters, so they cannot be fillers. The other three, BB, SS and ZZ, are struck out one letter each, in every combination, and the shorter text is tested with a repeating key, the self-feeding autokey, and both.
What the method does with the 24 known letters.
The copper has six places where a letter repeats its neighbour. One idea is that some of these are fillers, letters added to pad the text. Three of them sit inside EASTNORTHEAST and BERLINCLOCK, and each of their two letters stands for a different known letter, so they cannot be paddingnulls Letters inserted into a message that carry no meaning, used to pad it or to disguise it.. The other three, BB, SS and ZZ, could be. We strike out one letter of each, in every combination, and test the shorter text with the simplest ciphers, against scrambled coppers treated 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.
Doubled letters could be fillers, nulls added to break up the text. Striking them out would then reveal a simpler cipher underneath.
Three of the six doublets, QQ, SS and TT, fall inside EASTNORTHEAST and BERLINCLOCK, where each half carries a different known letter. They are real letters, not fillers.
The other three, BB, SS and ZZ, were struck in all seven combinations and tested with repeating keys, ciphertext autokey and both: nothing changes beyond the shuffled rate.
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.
null at carved place 43 (S): text of 96 letters
carved place 22 (F, known E) -> reduced place 22; carved place 64 (N, known B) -> reduced place 63
distance 22 to 64: 42 before, 41 after
Family, key space, the constraint under test, and the clues it reads.
Family 2, nulls tied to a visible feature (C17(b), C18(a): 'a bit of stego', a working text of other than 97 letters; C11: 'the other 91 characters'). Structural part: the doublets QQ (26-27), SS (33-34) and TT (68-69) carry the known pairs N,O; S,T; I,N, so neither letter of any of them can be a null, a repeated letter or filler, and any reading of the 6 doublets as 6 nulls (97 - 6 = 91) is dead. Search part: one letter of BB (19-20), SS (43-44) and ZZ (47-48), in each of the 7 non-empty combinations, removed as a null; the cribs keep their carved letters and move to the reduced positions. A null before both cribs (BB) leaves every periodic test unchanged and matters only for the autokey; nulls between the cribs (43, 47) change the cross-crib distances. Systems on each reduced text: periodic key, periods 1-52; ciphertext autokey with a constant, every lag; autokey plus a periodic key up to 26; plain, cipher and key alphabets standard or KRYPTOS, Vigenere or Beaufort, either sign. Controls: ten shuffled coppers with the same positions removed.
Written before the run; the result decides it.
No combination makes a periodic key of period 24 or less consistent; the autokey forms have no 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.
Doublets inside the cribs carrying two different known letters: [(26, 'QQ', 'NO'), (33, 'SS', 'ST'), (68, 'TT', 'IN')], so not nulls. nulls [19]: periodic P<=26 0 (controls 0-2), autokey 2+ checks 0 (0-0), autokey+periodic 3+ 0 (0-1); nulls [43]: periodic P<=26 8 (controls 8-8), autokey 2+ checks 0 (0-0), autokey+periodic 3+ 0 (0-0); nulls [47]: periodic P<=26 8 (controls 8-8), autokey 2+ checks 0 (0-0), autokey+periodic 3+ 0 (0-0); nulls [19, 43]: periodic P<=26 8 (controls 8-8), autokey 2+ checks 0 (0-0), autokey+periodic 3+ 0 (0-0); nulls [19, 47]: periodic P<=26 8 (controls 8-8), autokey 2+ checks 0 (0-0), autokey+periodic 3+ 0 (0-0); nulls [43, 47]: periodic P<=26 8 (controls 8-10), autokey 2+ checks 0 (0-0), autokey+periodic 3+ 0 (0-2); nulls [19, 43, 47]: periodic P<=26 8 (controls 8-10), autokey 2+ checks 0 (0-0), autokey+periodic 3+ 0 (0-1).
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.