Experiment 185
F4.2. 0040 decided every free trifid cube at periods 2-15 (no cube fits at any alignment). Its decider does not depend on the period: each known letter ties its three coordinates to coordinates of three carved letters in its block, whatever the block length. Here periods 16-97 (97: one block), every alignment, 4,633 settings, with the same caps; ten shuffled copies run through the same sweep as the null.
What the method does with the 24 known letters.
Sanborn is a sculptor; a trifidtrifid A cipher that turns each letter into three small digits, like floor, row and seat in a 27-seat cube, writes several letters' digits in rows, and regroups them, so each new letter is made from pieces of three old ones. code puts the alphabet in a 3 x 3 x 3 cube and mixes the three coordinates of neighbouring letters in groups. Groups of up to 15 letters were already ruled outdead Said of a period, grid or method when the known letters contradict it: no secret word of that kind can produce the carved letters.. Here every longer group, up to the whole text, with every starting point: do 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. allow any arrangement of the cube at all?
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 trifid code puts the 26 letters and ? in a 3 x 3 x 3 cube and mixes the three coordinates of neighbouring letters in groups: a sculptor's cipher. Groups of up to 15 letters were already ruled out (0040).
Every group length from 16 to the whole text, every starting place: each known letter ties its three coordinates to coordinates of carved letters; merging the ties and filling the cube so no two letters share a place decides each setting.
No cube fits K4, or any scrambled copy, at any setting; a planted text's cube is found. F4.2 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.
period 20, blocks from position 1: the block 21-40 carries EASTNORTHEAST at 22-34 against the carved FLRVQQPRNGKSS
81 coordinate variables merge into 22 classes under all the ties from the 24 known letters
backtracking over the classes with the all-different rule visited 1 nodes and found 0 cube(s)
Family, key space, the constraint under test, and the clues it reads.
C3 (Sanborn's visual, three-dimensional thinking: a cube), F4; Delastelle's trifid keeps one letter per letter on 27 symbols. Model as 0040: the k-th coordinate of carved letter j in a block of n equals coordinate (3j + k) div n of plaintext letter (3j + k) mod n. 72 equalities among 81 coordinate variables, then backtracking over the classes with the 27-distinct-addresses rule and 9-per-value counts. Statistic: settings admitting a cube, K4 against 10 shuffled copies; any surviving cube decrypts and is scored.
Written before the run; the result decides it.
No cube at any setting, as at 2-15; or cubes at the copies' rate whose decryptions are not English. Zero candidates.
The harness's record: candidates, gates, loss, and the negative result this experiment leaves behind.
4633 settings; 0 admit a cube on K4; 0 capped; copies with cubes: [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 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.