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I had never heard about this killer before, so I read a little just to get some more understanding about how he had inspired the character Scorpio.
That's when I discovered something interesting. This killer had sent a lot of letters containing cryptograms to several newspapers and police stations, telling them that his identity was hidden in these. The three first cryptograms proved too difficult for code experts to crack, but not for a school teacher and his wife. They managed to crack the code one week after it had been released.
However, there are still three ciphers that to this date have not been solved. So if you like a good challenge, why not give it a go?
I love these kind of riddles, myself. Those of you that follow the online comic Order of the Stick are probably aware that Haley was speaking in ciphers for a long while.
If you are interested in twisting your brain a little, you can find all of the ciphers here.
And to create a bit more use for this topic, what kind of Brain Twisters do you like? Do you have a particular strategy for solving puzzles? Or have you maybe created a code that no-one has yet cracked?
Please share your experience, and if you have a go at the Zodiac ciphers, please post about your progress
My own approach to ciphers is that I begin by first counting all the characters used in the text. This is to determine if one character equals a single letter, or if there is irregularities. For example, if there are 40 characters in the text, it is obvious that several characters replace a single letter. I then start to look for characters that stand next to eachother, as there is a good chance that these characters (and only these) replace a single letter. After that I start looking for character patterns, to determine if there are any. For instance, in the first three Zodiac ciphers the letter O had been encrypted with the following characters: X, I, T, and a reverse D. So that in the text, the first O would be written as X. The second would be written as an I, the third as a T, the fourth would be a reverse D, and the fifth would be an X again.
I am working on this one at the moment. It consist of 63-65 characters, so it should have some serious character patterns.
So far I belive that I have discovered four letter patterns, all single characters.
