Experiment 181
F2.1, the gap 0057 left. 0057 struck every copy of one or two letters outside the known runs (351 masks) and found the smallest repeating key that fits, 24-27, as often as random strike-outs. It did not read what those keys force. Here, for every mask and every setting that fits at length 24 or 25 (12 table rules), the key letters the 24 known letters fix decrypt the other places in the same slots; the runs of forced letters outside the known runs are searched for dictionary words of 6 or more letters. Control: the same masks on ten copies that keep the carved letters at the 24 known places and shuffle the other 73 (each mask strikes the same number of letters).
What the method does with the 24 known letters.
Perhaps some letters on the copper are fillers: every Q, say, to be ignored. 0057 struck them out and found a repeating secret wordthe secret word The word or string a cipher needs besides the method. of 24 or 25 letters could still fit, but no more often than by chance. Such a long word is mostly fixed by 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., so it decrypts most of the rest of the messagethe message The 97 letters of English that Jim Sanborn wrote and enciphered.. We read those decrypted pieces and look for real words, and do the same on scrambled copies.
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.
If every copy of one or two letters were filler, striking them out moves the known words. 0057 found a repeating key of 24 or 25 letters could then fit, as often as by chance. Such a key fixes most of the message: does what it fixes read as English?
For each of 351 choices of filler and each fitting setting, the readings at the places the key fixes, outside the known words, searched for dictionary words of 6 letters or more; the same on ten scrambled copies.
K4's readings hold no such word at all; the copies' hold 0 to 32. F2.1 closed.
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.
Q at [26, 27, 39, 42]; struck outside the known runs: [39, 42]; BERLINCLOCK moves from 64-74 to 62-72
Family, key space, the constraint under test, and the clues it reads.
Scheidt: 'I masked the English language' (C2); filler letters by letter are a hand masking device (F2). Model: carved letters of the struck set outside the runs are nulls; the rest is a periodic tableau cipher of period P on standard/KRYPTOS alphabets (Vigenere, Beaufort, variant). At P = 24, 25 the known letters fix most key slots, so most of the message is forced. Statistic: settings whose forced fragments hold a dictionary word of 6+ letters, and the longest such word, K4 against 10 kept-place copies under the same masks.
Written before the run; the result decides it.
Settings with a 6+ letter word in the forced fragments: K4 inside the copies' range; the longest word no longer than on copies. Zero candidates.
The harness's record: candidates, gates, loss, and the negative result this experiment leaves behind.
fitting settings K4 1620 (copies 1020-1620); with a 6+ letter word K4 0 (copies 0-32); longest K4 0 (copies 0-7)
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.