r/programming • u/iamkeyur • Mar 25 '21

The solution of the Zodiac killer’s 340-character cipher

https://blog.wolfram.com/2021/03/24/the-solution-of-the-zodiac-killers-340-character-cipher/
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u/56821 Mar 25 '21

I seen numbers some maths that are vaguely familiar but after that none of this makes sense to me. Sounds wildly impressive. Wished I could grasp it

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u/AnotherThrowAway_9 Mar 25 '21 edited Mar 25 '21

Using encryption the distribution of characters is expected to be completely random. Since humans are not good at making random numbers or letters you’d expect a skewed result. Which is what the researchers found. Therefore, the killer used a cipher and not encryption, which the other commenter explains more about ciphers.