I either solved the Z13 or I’m going crazy.

[BeatrixKiddo42]

The other night I couldn’t sleep. I have muscle problems that were keeping me awake. So I tried to find something to keep my mind occupied. I watched the video about solving the 340 and decided to see if I could solve the 13.

The letter starts out “By the way did you crack the last cipher I sent you?” So I figured he knew it was too short to solve by itself. You had to solve the 340 to solve this one. So I used the code key for the 340. I reworked it a little and got a message:

DREAM ON OLD MAN

At first I was shocked I got a message then I thought I was crazy because I didn’t know who the old man could be. Then I found out a cryptographer had asked him to put his name in a code. I also found out a French engineer partially applied the key to it and got DREA so I thought maybe I wasn’t completely off the deep end.

I’ve tried contacting the guy who solved the last one but I haven’t heard back. I contacted a guy who runs a zodiac website and he hasn’t responded either. I don’t know what to do. Who am I supposed to contact?

For the record I’m not an expert on this case. I’m not even good with puzzles. I’m just a woman who couldn’t sleep one night.

Any help you can give me would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance. Feel free to email.

 

[Richard]

I don't consider myself an "expert" on this Zodiac case, but have followed it for some time.

The subject of cryptography is an interesting part of the story. It would appear that the actual killer of the initial known victims did indeed write the first letter which contained the 3 part encrypted message.

That message was written in a rather simple cryptogram, which was fairly easy to decode using standard techniques and deductions.

In drafting his later messages, he likely used a more complex code, which may have used a number of "resets" throughout the message texts. By this, I mean a shift in his code at various points to make decoding more difficult.

 

[shetalksinstereo]

I don't consider myself an "expert" on this Zodiac case, but have followed it for some time.

The subject of cryptography is an interesting part of the story. It would appear that the actual killer of the initial known victims did indeed write the first letter which contained the 3 part encrypted message.

That message was written in a rather simple cryptogram, which was fairly easy to decode using standard techniques and deductions.

In drafting his later messages, he likely used a more complex code, which may have used a number of "resets" throughout the message texts. By this, I mean a shift in his code at various points to make decoding more difficult.

The Zodiac Killer’s cipher is finally solved after 51 years

Did you see this?

 

[VT_Squire]

The problem with this boils down more or less to the ratio of different cipher symbols to the total number of characters. The end result is that you can shoehorn pretty much anything into this information space and you are left with no criteria for saying other, alternate approaches are not equally valid.

Using just a 1-1 ratio of symbols to plaintext characters, there are still nearly 63 billion different permutations to select from.

What makes this one right vs all those alternatives?

It's like having a cipher that's only 1 character long and just saying X = G. Why not Z, or A?

The Z13 is a little longer than one character, but it still succumbs to the same basic issue. There's just not enough information present to suss out any sustained patterns of language from which to draw an educated inference, the presence of a coherent message, let alone the intended one, let alone an exclusive one. Sorry to poop on your parade, but crypto has to be intelligible to the recipient either a pre-shared key, or a key which can be qualified by virtue of a sustained reliable performance. 13 characters across 8 unique symbols is just not long enough to do that.

 

[GoBuckeyes]

The Zodiac Killer’s cipher is finally solved after 51 years

Did you see this?

It seems as is at least half in the zodiac community don't believe it was solved??