Sculptor Gives a Hint For CIA's Kryptos 151
omega_cubed writes "The New York Times reports that Jim Sanborn, the sculptor who created the wavy metal pane called Kryptos that sits in front of the CIA in Langley, VA, has gotten tired of waiting for code-breakers to decode the last of the four messages. 'I assumed the code would be cracked in a fairly short time,' [Sanborn] said, adding that the intrusions on his life from people who think they have solved his fourth puzzle are more than he expected. So now, after 20 years, Mr. Sanborn is nudging the process along. He has provided The New York Times with the answers to six letters in the sculpture's final passage. The characters that are the 64th through 69th in the final series on the sculpture read NYPVTT. When deciphered, they read BERLIN."
Intrusions? (Score:2, Interesting)
Not to say that the geeks don't geek, but c'mon... what intrusions? My guess: he just wanted someone to care again.
They sentenced me to 20 years of cryptanalysis. (Score:1, Interesting)
There's no crypto behind this guess. Just a leap of intuition from a reference to Webster to King Tut. And the fact that Cohen's First We Take Manhattan was published in 1988, which would have been current around the time the puzzle was being designed for construction in 1990. And the first line of second verse would be a pretty neat thing to slip into a puzzle like this.
123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123BERLIN012345678
theysentencedmeto20yearsofboredomfirstwetakemanhattanthenwetakeBERLIN
There's just a few dozen big problems with this sort of guessing. First, second, third, and fourth, I'm cheating. I used the first line and the last line of the first verse in order to make it fit. I'm really cheating, since you don't have digits in the solution set, and would have to encode "20" as "XX" in Roman numerals. And knowing all this, I still felt a flash of "WOW" as I measured the characters. Funny thing how the brain works.
That's the fun part about conspiracy theories - you can be completely wrong (the words don't line up!), you can be completely wrong (the words line up just fine if you pick the right lines, except you can't put digits in the message...), you can be completely wrong (fine, replace "20" with roman numerals!), and eventually (I'm sure if I'd been off by one character, I'd have said "start at zero", but I didn't have to for purposes of this post), you'll find a solution that fits.
What the thinker thinks, the prover proves.
But it was a fun diversion for a Saturday evening. Given that a material chunk of the plaintext has been disclosed, and that we can now assume the plaintext to be in English, I'm looking forward to the real solution in a few months.
There are no shortcuts, and good luck to those in the business who actually know what they're doing: starting with the math, and let the solution reveal itself.
Something jumped out at me (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not familiar with Kryptos, and I'm not one for cryptography. We know there are (at least) two layers here, the encryption and the resulting riddle. Obviously Sanborn is being coy.
The word IQLUSION stood out to me. At face value this seems to be a misspelling of illusion, but also obvious is the beginning IQ: intelligence quotient. If that is abbreviated to intelligence, and you read through the rest, you get intelligence illusion. Perhaps a reference to counter-intelligence? This is Langley, after all.
Maybe this is old news, or nothing, or part of the second layer riddle. Just something I thought of after a few minutes. I didn't have any insight about UNDERGRUUND, though.
Re:I'd like to solve the puzzle, Pat (Score:3, Interesting)
If you walk up to someone and start the conversation in German, it can continue in German. If you need to conduct business and aren't comfortable concluding it in a language you struggle with, you can always switch to English and be successful.
I was able to use quite a bit more German than I thought I would when I visited Austria and Germany for a few weeks in 2008; it had been almost a decade since I had studied German in college.
Re:Poor Cryptographer? (Score:2, Interesting)
Misdirection ? (Score:5, Interesting)
The message might well read something like : rememBER LINcoln's birthplace...
Re:I'd like to solve the puzzle, Pat (Score:3, Interesting)
Exactly. I am German and there is a game we play with little kids called "Teekesselchen". This is a game where the goal is to find the meaning or a word which is pronounced the same but means different things. The opponent needs to figure out the word by me describing the item without using the actual word.
One Example is Boxer which can be a human fighter or a dog.
Same goes for Berliner, most Germans with a basic understanding of German/English know that JFK was not talking about a jelly doughnut.
Re:It's the CIA guys. (Score:3, Interesting)
dead puppies and rainbow-colored gut piles, yes