CIA Sculpture

[JohnNichols]

There is an interesting problem on a CIA Sculpture that has an postulated unsolvable code.  But the code could be crackable, each letter represents a potential ring of 26 letters and no spaces. 

We have a few of the words, we could start with the original code, and loop through code, moving one ring at a time and then compare the group of letters to a word list.  They are simple English words. 

Problem where would we find a list of English words in a text format, 

We test it against the known words to see if we can get it work. 

Is this possible or have I missed something.                  Sample           WORK     ==        QVKD    is a simple translation and it should be findable in a short while.  

[JohnNichols]

Clearly in Fortran 

[Steve_Lionel]

John, are you really unaware that hundreds if not thousands of people have been working on Kryptos for years? If you read up on what the first three segments say, some of them have deliberate errors to frustrate solutions such as you propose.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kryptos

[JohnNichols]

Yes I am aware of the chances are smaller than zero - but it is an interesting programming exercise. Can we just not have some fun.  God sometimes smiles on the stupid

Remember the Titans

[JohnNichols]

Actually the odds may not be zero.  

The crunching of the numbers as a brute force attack is unlikely, However, there are two keys worlds already given, the number of sentences using standard English words that fit the 97 letter pattern is going to be limited, one should be able to narrow it down to a couple of million alternatives, from there we may be able to generate the key method, this is social engineering, because there is so much information.  

For instance there are only 4 letters that can be used as single word letters, A,I,X and ?  It is highly likely there is at least one X.  

Similarly although there are a lot of two letter words in English, but only a few of them make sense - at etc.. no one is going to use one of the obscure Scrabble words like gz.  

So rather than crack the uncrackable - try the back door. I mean if the NSA can be back door people why not us.