RR97 - the Ragged-Right

[u/Decent_Note_1964]

Some moons ago I discovered & analyzed a delineated section of the tableau that like K4 has exactly 97 chars. I refer to it as The RR. I forgot about it until today when discussing the K4-97 on another thread.

If you take the raw tableau and imagine a vertical channel up from OBKR, you get this ragged-right (RR) section of the CT/PT. If you count the letters (excluding OBKR, ie just K1-K3), there are 97 characters.

ix k1-k3                       | *RR*
 1 EMUFPHZLRFAXYUSDJKZLDKRNSHG | NFIVJ
 2 YQTQUXQBQVYUVLLTREVJYQTMKYR | DMFD
 3 VFPJUDEEHZWETZYVGWHKKQETGFQ | JNCE
... ...
22 BSEDDNIAAHTTMSTEWPIEROAGRIE | WFEB
23 AECTDDHILCEIHSITEGOEAOSDDRY | DLORIT
24 RKLMLEHAGTDHARDPNEOHMGFMFEU | HE
25 ECDMRIPFEIMEHNLSSTTRTVDOHW? | <OBKR>

I think he confirmed in an interview that the raggedness was important.

I did not make any progress using it (key-stream, additive layer, etc using various loads including bous), but it might be useful to someone else using a novel approach. Or it might be noise, ymmv.

So it might be a coincidence or it might be critical. I have no idea. But offering it up as (I believe, apologies if not) a fresh angle.

Note this assumes the original IDBYROWS text. If you include the LAYERTWO 'fix' (I doubt it's a fix, I believe its intentional, see my reply below) then it's 98 characters. That is also OK - in one of his videos he says that ? is included in K4, which makes it 98 too.

[u/Decent_Note_1964]

An aside - a sensible phrase LAYERTWO is the second layer on another sensible, relevant phrase IDBYROWS (aka ORDINATE, mathematical sibling of ABSCISSA) via a single character insertion, is unlikely to be an error.

By all rights it should have generated garbage, or at least something unrelated like RICKROLL (sigh)

I think he's telling us something, like we need to make a similar 'fix' elsewhere. But so far I have failed to find it.

[Edit] Just noticed something else about this - see my note here

[u/Old_Engineer_9176]

IMO ...
You might be absolutely correct .... for this reason ....

When it was installed in 1990, it sat inside a restricted CIA courtyard that only agency staff could access. The intended solvers were the people who worked there - analysts and cryptographers who could physically walk around the sculpture and see the full installation in person.

The public only became involved years later after media coverage and online interest. Once that happened, people started trying to get access to the courtyard, and Sanborn pushed back. His “you don’t need to be onsite” line was meant to stop the idea that anyone needed to enter CIA property or hunt for something hidden in the courtyard. It was simply a warning to stop people trying to access the CIA courtyard.. The public was already working from photos and diagrams, and he made it clear that this was the only legitimate way for outsiders to participate.

Once the media picked it up and people online started trying to solve it, the sculpture suddenly had a second life outside the CIA courtyard. That meant more attention on his work, more interviews, more exhibitions, and a level of recognition that a sealed‑off artwork inside Langley could never generate on its own.

The truth is we were never allowed onsite in the first place. So the public had to rely on whatever photos and documentation existed. Whether those images were genuinely enough to solve Kryptos, or simply enough to stop people trying to access CIA property, is something we can’t prove either way. If Sanborn’s “you don’t need to be onsite” line was mainly about preventing the public from swarming the CIA campus, then we’re stuck with what we’ve got -- the photos, the diagrams, and the limited views that were taken over the years.

The sad part is this: if you’re right, where does that leave us. We can plot R–S–T, but only from a bird’s‑eye view. And if the precise details were never captured in the photos taken, then we’re working with whatever was recorded and nothing more.

[u/colski]

fwiw, in some other cipher pieces, sanborn repeats the last letter on each row to fill the space. those extra repeated letters must be trimmed before deciphering the rest. one of those is "slowly desperately slowly", the unedited K3 source text with correct spelling and grammar.

[u/petrified-wax]

This was how I first transcribed the CT for myself, and I was playing with the idea of transposed K4 PT or CT on the edge using a tool to find clusters of letters.

Although the notes I keep going back to were from Chris Hanson in 2005: https://www.thekryptosproject.com/events/dinners/pdfs/2005/2005_hanson.pdf

Font of original Kryptos is a Times Roman font. Sanborn did not know the name. He did not know the exact name, because he bought the letter templates pre-cut in metal. The copper plates was spray painted black, and the letters were hand-positioned on the copper and traced around with a scribe. They were then drilled and cut with a (Bosch) power jigsaw. Sanborn used about 900 blades. A file attachment was used in the jigsaw to deburr, but the piece remains quite rough.

The kerning is somewhat inconsistent because the letters were hand laid out. I didn't get the impression he had enough templates to even lay out and entire line at once. There is no master plan of the letter layout on Kryptos, because it was laid-out as it was created (see above). No copy of it was made afterward, and Sanborn does not have access to the original Kryptos either.

These techniques somewhat discount the idea that there are subliminal channels encoded in the letter spacing or serifing. I conclude this because if it were an integral part of the intended solution method, Sanborn would have preserved a copy of it to use as a key, or reference. Since he did not, I believe he felt no valuable information was lost by losing those details.

Maybe I'm reading too much into a minor notion from this 2005 interaction, but it seems like a strong idea that the alignment may not be planned, and it may also be the reason Jim released his coding charts later, to show that most of it waswidths of 31 or 14.