to while away the Sunday afternoon,
in the
CIA headquarters in November of 1990, Kryptos,
a coded sculpture created by American artist Jim Sanborn was installed there, and here is the thing, it has remained unsolved
ever since it was originally installed, now the guys at the CIA are no fools, they have tried
every technique in the book, transposition, binary, polyalphabetic
substitution, even Morse code, but so far no one has been able to decipher the
97-character-long fourth part of the Kryptos Sculpture, other
professional puzzle solvers around the world have been struggling to unravel
the secrets of the 1,800 characters carved into the 12-foot block of copper,
and although they’ve succeeded in cracking three of the coded messages created
by Sanborn, the fourth and final one remains unsolved, above photograph Jim Sanborn/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0),
interestingly,
the first three parts of the Kryptos code were solved in the first eight years
after the sculpture was installed at Langley, but no one has made any progress
since. That’s because, the first two parts are relatively straightforward
enough that anyone with solid cryptography knowledge can figure them out. The
third part is reportedly much more advanced, but the fourth, the one that
everyone has been struggling with, is essentially almost impossible to solve, over the
last 30 years, the fourth Kryptos code has been tackled by cryptography experts
from the CIA, NSA as well as freelancers around the world. There’s even an
international Kryptos group of thousands of code breakers and enthusiasts that
work together to solve or at least help solve this mystery. Every year, some of
them even meet with Jim Sanborn to hopefully get some helpful clues out of him,
but over the years he has gotten better and better at keeping them guessing,
I have made a small copy of this video above, but if you want to look at it full size have a look here, back to Sanborn, it is not that he refuses to help at all. In fact, he was kind enough to reveal
not one, but two clues to help people solve the elusive last part of his
puzzle. A few years ago he revealed that the 64th to 69th letters (NYPVTT) of
the 97-letter- long message NYPVTT translate to “BERLIN”. Then a few years
later, he provided another clue – Letters 70 to 74 in the code spelled CLOCK.
So we know that part of the code translates to BERLIN CLOCK. He even encouraged
people to “delve into that particular clock” for a better chance of deciphering
the code. Sadly, that wasn’t enough to help solve the rest of the puzzle, Jim Sanborn
is now in his 70s, and some have asked what would happen if he should pass away
before the final section of Kryptos is deciphered. The artist revealed that the
written solution is locked away in a safety deposit box and that he has already
passed it on to someone who can confirm it in case someone finally cracks the
code, obviously,
no one knows what the final part of the Kryptos code will reveal, or how it
ties in with the first three parts, but some have speculated that the four
parts make up a larger riddle. Sanborn remains tight-lipped about that as well, Jim Sanborn
sounds like a cryptography mastermind, but in reality Kryptos was his first
cryptographic sculpture. And yet, it has managed to elude seasoned experts who
have been obsessed with it for decades, so the mission, if you choose to take it, is break the code!
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