Experiment 114
AMSCO (A. M. Scott, 1950s ACA) fills a keyed grid with cells that alternate one and two letters, then reads the columns in key order, so letter pairs travel together. It is in none of the route sets. Here every dictionary word giving 3-15 columns keys it, with either cell size first, forward and inverse, with a repeating key of length 1-26 after or before.
What the method does with the 24 known letters.
AMSCO is a column shufflea column shuffle Writing the text in rows under a key word and reading the columns in the alphabetical order of the key's letters. in which the grid's boxes hold one letter, then two, then one, alternating, so some pairs of letters stay together when the columns are read out under a secret word. We try every dictionary word as the column word, with a short repeating secret word on 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. before or after, against 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..
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.
AMSCO writes the message into a grid in cells of one and two letters by turns, then reads the columns in a key word's order. Every dictionary word of 3 to 15 letters is the key here, starting with either cell size.
After the move a repeating secret word on the table must give the copper's letters where the known letters landed; two known letters in one slot of the word must agree.
Period 23 after the move: 21 settings against 1-15, or 15 distinct check sets against 1-9, from obscure key words. Over 52 cells about 4.7 such excesses are expected by chance, so this one is within chance.
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.
AMSCO under SHADOW, first cell one letter: the first rows of cells (place numbers)
1 2-3 4 5-6 7 8-9
10-11 12 13-14 15 16-17 18
19 20-21 22 23-24 25 26-27
28-29 30 31-32 33 34-35 36
columns read in the order [3, 4, 2, 5, 1, 6]
place letter lands at copper there
22 E 4 R
23 A 20 B
24 S 21 W
25 T 54 L
64 B 77 D
Family, key space, the constraint under test, and the clues it reads.
Type 1, a hand route not tested before. AMSCO: rows of w cells holding alternately 1 and 2 letters, each row starting with the other size from the row above, the first cell 1 or 2; columns read in true keyword order (repeats dropped, or the whole word), cells top to bottom; w = 3-15 from every dictionary word; forward and inverse, deduplicated. Key: periodic 1-26 after (slot = carved place mod p) or before, 8 tableau classes, exact by slot agreement. Keeping letter pairs together would also keep some English adjacency, as the width-21 repeats suggest (0018). Ten shuffled coppers.
Written before the run; the result decides it.
Nothing consistent below period 20; counts inside the coppers' range, give or take one period. Zero candidates.
The harness's record: candidates, gates, loss, and the negative result this experiment leaves behind.
445,680 distinct AMSCO settings from 234,428 words, 891,360 routes x 8 classes x 2 orders, periods 1-26. K4 live below 20: 0. Outside the control range: {'A': [23], 'B': []}.
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.