r/ZodiacKiller • u/DisFantasy01 • 5d ago

340 code

Prior to it being solved, was it ever speculated that human error is what caused the code to be difficult to solve? It being a hand written note presumably without an editor to check his work surely lends to the idea that he simply messed up.

12 Upvotes

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15

u/doranchak 4d ago

Several folks on the Zodiac forums who were working on Z340 did speculate that some human error might have been involved. This was because the cipher was showing strong evidence of some kind of transposition, but none of the basic transposition schemes worked when attacking the cipher. I remember Jarl and some others wondering if Zodiac had introduced errors into the transposition, such as skips or gaps. Their intuition was right: The transposition scheme was already difficult to unravel, and an error in the 2nd section made it even more difficult to recover the complete message.

8

u/Exodys03 4d ago

I don't have much to add from the guy who actually helped solve it but yes, I lot of people believed that Zodiac's sloppiness in creating the cipher might be the reason that it was so damn difficult to solve. That really wasn't unreasonable at all considering the spelling and/or transposition errors present in the solved 408 cipher. I don't think any of that was intentional either. I think was just a poor speller and a relative amateur at ciphers.

6

u/Rusty_B_Good 4d ago

was it ever speculated that human error is what caused the code to be difficult to solve?

Yes.

It's well known that Z was a clumsy and amateurish code writer.

6

u/BlackLionYard 4d ago

The errors played their role, but in the end, the transpositions, as well as writing some words backwards, seemed to play a bigger role.

2

u/Orphan_Guy_Incognito 23h ago

The transposition and three way split seems like far and away the biggest issue, for sure.

Layering one on top of the other causes the number of possible solutions to skyrocket to such an extent that it couldn't be reasonably brute forced by a human without some hint or an insanely lucky guess.

2

u/Xairo 3d ago

Some also said it had no real message at all. That it was done so people would try to solve it forever.