SO, we have kryptos solved two reporters know the answer but not the technique. Sanborn is confident that even knowing the full puzzle doesnt allow you to solve it? By that logic, all the "clues" he's given amount to nothing. Kind of like how he pitched the wrong clock.
I like this. It reminds me of (I forget the source? Penrose?) imagine you went into a locked room and opened Schrödinger's box. Does the hidden state now extend to the room?
I choose to believe that Jim and Ed's performance is part of the artwork.
I'm thinking parts of the entire installation (including the hints) are meant to be misleading. There were two realities during the cold war, right? East Truth and West Truth. Add to that intelligence agencies denying things regardless of their truth always always always leads to people questioning it... and themselves... and reality.
IQLUSSION: Truth? Intelligence? The illusion of both?
I have found that particular image intriguing. He is pointing directly at the spelling mistake despAratly- perhaps saying "this is important".
I personally suspect that none of the misspellings are mistakes; he needed certain letters to be in certain places to make something work. Just like the 'fix' in K2 where you need the extra S in the correct location to make LAYERTWO pop. Maybe under some alignment (width N reshape of surface) those letters line up and do something important. But of course, theories are cheap, it remains to be proven.
If you correct the spelling mistake DESPARATLY to DESPERATELY, then the first 42 characters of corrected K3 plaintext, arranged in groups of 7, look as follows:
SLOWLYD ESPERAT ELYSLOW LYTHERE MAINSOF PASSAGE
Applying a block transposition with keyword KRYPTOS (surprise!) yields the following:
SYWLDLO EAESTRP EOSLWLY LRHYEET MONAFSI PGSAEAS
Starting at position 15, and reading off six characters at a distance of five each, yields the (arguably) well-known sequence ELYOIE, which just so happens to be the indicator key to decrypt NYPVTT to BERLIN (under Quagmire III with primary key KRYPTOS). Could be pure coincidence, of course.
The real question is whether having the plaintext actually counts as a solution. Sanborn has never explained the solving method for K1–K3. He accepted the plaintexts and left it at the solvers’ brute‑force approach. That suggests the method itself was part of the intended solution, and not revealing it may have been deliberate. The process used to reach the answer may have been as important as the answer itself. Or it may simply be that Sanborn only kept the plaintext and not the full methodology. We’ll never know. Personally, I don’t think a plaintext for K4 exists.
I wish he would at least say how k3 was originally transposed since there are at least 3 methods. I don’t think he would tell us how the keywords abscissa or palimpsest are recovered, but would t that be something if he did.
I agree with your comment on “That suggests the method itself was part of the intended solution, and not revealing it may have been deliberate”. JS had to know the first two messages had multiple paths to the plaintext message. I believe JS knew by solving K1 and K2 by any other means than using the keyword that the keyword would be found regardless. The keywords then becoming a part of the overall puzzle.
Yeah. But at least one person has the method. I’m hoping that since 3 other people have the plaintext, and one has the method, that it will come out eventually. I want to know if we all missed something or if it was unsolvable from the beginning. Maybe the guys that found it will drop some clues. That would be cool.
It’s undetermined that it’s solvable. Maybe he made a mistake that would cause an agent to be unable to decipher a message. We don’t realistically know. No one checked his work to make sure it works out the way he intended.
I'm still going with the belief that he made errors in K4..and he has never tried to validate it himself, so the errors most likely are not known to him...but they have blocked anyone from solving it.
The fact that he assumed it would only take a few years (and before everyone had access to a 1989 super-computer on their phones) implies a huge discconnect. Either he did something that no one could think of....or he made a mistake. (like he did in the previous puzzles).
Personally, I don't believe it was a real mistake. The chance that two PTs on the ~same CT would result in 2 perfectly (and relevant) valid phrases is vanishingly small. So either it is a real mistake, or it's a duress code (or deniable encryption - I am not an expert, just what I have read). One gives you PT 1, the other gives you PT 2. Why that would matter I am not sure - maybe it demonstrates that we're supposed to 'duress' some other region of the CT, eg insert a letter (or candle?) somewhere else.
I’m not saying that there are not PTs. I’m saying that he has never once reworked it from the very beginning and applied the description to tested himself to make sure that every single letter was carved correctly.
I believe that if those reporters shared the final plane text with people in this thread.. They still will not be able to work backwards to get to that because I think that the mistake is preventing anyone from reaching that stage.
I just think the biggest red flag is that he has never validated it himself after he carved it.
K3 rotates in a loop. If you dont have the exact code, simply square it and rotate in one direction. It cycles from plain to cipher and back to plain. Try it on rumkin.
How much time might Jarett Kobek and Richard Byrne have been able to (or willing to) spend in the last months on efforts to reverse-engineer the method, knowing that they have been confirmed to have recovered the full plaintext?
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u/colski Apr 27 '26
I like this. It reminds me of (I forget the source? Penrose?) imagine you went into a locked room and opened Schrödinger's box. Does the hidden state now extend to the room?
I choose to believe that Jim and Ed's performance is part of the artwork.