Experiment 109
0010 and 0053 rebuilt the tableau from the puzzle's own 61 words and the K1-K3 and 2025-letter words, the way KRYPTOS builds the carved one. Here the keyword is any of the 233,000 words of four letters or more in the project dictionary, used for the plain alphabet, the cipher alphabet or both (with the standard or KRYPTOS alphabet on the other side), with a repeating key of length 1-26 and no move.
What the method does with the 24 known letters.
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. on Kryptos starts each alphabet with the word KRYPTOS and then the other letters in order. Any word can make such a table. Experiments 10 and 53 tried the puzzle's own words. Here we try every word in an English dictionary, about 233,000 of them, with a short repeating secret word on top, and ask whether any table lets the 24 known lettersthe known letters Sanborn has confirmed that positions 22 to 34 of the message read EASTNORTHEAST and positions 64 to 74 read BERLINCLOCK. fit.
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.
K1 and K2 used a table keyed by a word, KRYPTOS. Here every dictionary word of four letters or more keys the table, as K1-K3 did, with a repeating secret word on top.
On SHADOW's table each known place needs one key value; with a key of p letters, places p apart must need the same. With p = 7, places 22 and 29 need 1 and 25.
208,062 tables, keys of 1 to 26 letters, 10 rules: nothing fits a key shorter than 26 on K4, while scrambled coppers reach 25. K4 is if anything harder to fit.
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.
keyword SHADOW: alphabet SHADOWBCEFGIJKLMNPQRTUVXYZ; both sides, Vigenere
place known carved key value
22 E F 1
23 A L 12
24 S R 19
25 T V 2
26 N Q 2
27 O Q 14
28 R P 24
29 T R 25
30 H N 15
31 E G 2
32 A K 11
33 S S 0
34 T S 6
64 B N 10
65 E Y 16
66 R P 24
67 L V 8
68 I T 9
69 N T 4
70 C M 8
71 L Z 11
72 O F 5
73 C P 10
74 K K 0
Family, key space, the constraint under test, and the clues it reads.
Sanborn: a 'slightly different tableau' (C11a); K1-K2 use a keyword-mixed Quagmire III (KRYPTOS). 0005 closed periods 1-26 for the carved and standard alphabets, 0010 and 0053 for puzzle words. Alphabet W = keyword's distinct letters then the rest in order. Classes (consistency depends only on the plain and cipher alphabets and Beaufort versus not, 0006): (W, W), (W, STD), (STD, W), (W, KRY), (KRY, W), each Beaufort or not: 10 per word. Exact slot agreement at every period 1-26. Distinct alphabets only (words giving the same W counted once). Ten shuffled coppers. C8, C11a.
Written before the run; the result decides it.
No word gives a consistent period below 20; the number of (alphabet, class) pairs consistent at each period 21-26 lies inside the ten coppers' range. Zero candidates.
The harness's record: candidates, gates, loss, and the negative result this experiment leaves behind.
208,062 distinct alphabets from 232,989 words x 10 classes = 2,080,620 settings, periods 1-26. Smallest live period: K4 26, controls [26, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25]. K4 live below 20: 0. Outside the control range: [].
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.