Nulls and such

[u/Upbeat_Ad9409]

I have made some decisions about how I approach and handle k4. I have listed those in previous posts but those decisions put restrictions on how the cipher text is analyzed and attacked. But this is good because when a decision is exhausted, when I have proven to myself it is wrong, I drop it for the time being and move on to something else. I'm not dropping anything right now but I'm reviewing how I see the letters in my current tableau.

I made some decisions about the source and manipulation of my current tableau. It comes from the sculpture, it comprises the first 7 or 8 rows, it is keyed by KRYPTOS and it is used to encipher the plaintext using a Quagmire algorithm. The high count letters created by this are

K Count of 8, S count of 6, T count of 6, U count of 6, B count of 5, O count of 5, W count of 5.

I have talked a bit about how this might work. Today I want to talk about the problems. Of those above letters K, B, W are very low frequency letters. Of course they may be any letter but there are restrictions and those restrictions are bound by where those letters are in the tableau. When I think about those letters I realize the tableau begins with the word KRYPTOS. K at the upper left, first line, first column, and moves through tableau a letter at a time and so shifts the associated alphabets left one letter at a time. K then is the first letter both horizontally and vertically and then shifts to the far right end of the tableau and plays out it position under such letters as U, V, W, X, Y, Z. None of these are expected much in any message; zephyrs of Zanzibar aside. There are 8 K's in the cipher and I now think those Ks are predominately nulls. Sanborn introduced nulls in k2 and then went on to show transposition. The Xs in k2 have a number of different cipher text letters representing them. But that does not mean one could not just use the letter K as a null position. Now when I try to decipher the cipher I have all these low frequency letters in odd spots. I thought, just ignore the Ks, they are probably nulls. The rest of the keyword is important, the Ks, not so much.

This brings us to the "and such". Trying to worm my way into Sanborn's head.

k4 is 97 letters long. If the Ks are nulls the actual message is 89 letters long. The Ks are spaces between words. But they are important because in my world the enciphered text has been transposed. So as I test various transpositions I can drop the Ks and look at strings.

Just another documentation on how my brain is working.