idea for a kryptos wiki

Every summer I drive across the country from Baltimore, MD to Richland, WA to intern at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. This past summer I was working in the Knowledge Systems group on developing a social network generating extension for a semantic wiki used to organize academic papers relevant to the LiDAR research community.

As a result, MediaWiki and I have gotten to know each other very well.  I spent many long days setting up installations, adding various extensions, and formatting page after page of documents using wiki markup. You would think that I would hate wikis by now, but in fact, the opposite is true. I love them, and I am constantly thinking of applications for the wiki and semantic wiki environment.

When I first learned about Kryptos last semester in my Cryptology course the first thing I did that night was Google search until I could Google search no more. I was so fascinated, as many are, by the sculpture that I wished that someone had written a textbook on it. It would have a chapter on basic cryptographic knowledge, a chapter on the over 15 year story, a chapter on the solutions thus far, and a well organized list of all the clues, theories, and ideas that anyone had ever come up with for solving K4 and deciphering the larger meaning of the puzzle. To create a repository of information such as this would require the input of every person in the community of those interested in Kryptos and looking to solve K4, from the casual yahoo group subscriber to the completely obsessed, but the result would be rewarding for everyone- A one stop shop for all of your Kryptos needs, whether you are just learning or a seasoned expert.

It is 2:00AM so I will cut to the chase. I set up a MediaWiki installation at kryptoswiki.com in the hopes that my fellow kryptos enthusiasts would be willing to join me in adding all we know for the benefit of the current community and especially its future members. I literally just set up the whole thing earlier this evening so bear in mind that this project is in its infancy and so far close to nothing has been added. However I am going to keep working on adding information, purchasing upgrades as I see fit, and installing extensions and creating templates for convenience purposes over the course of this semester/academic year.

I’m very optimistic about this project and I hope that others who find out about it will be as well. If you are reading this and you know something about Kryptos, go take a minute or two to make an account and think about what you can contribute! Thanks in advance!

-Katherine

P.S. I am waiting (for up to 24 hrs) on sendmail capability and my space upgrade to be set up- for the time being email confirmation is therefore not required to make an account and uploads are disabled.

ninety-seven, or ninety-eight?

I understand there is some debate over whether K4 is comprised of the last 97 or last 98 characters of Kryptos, or some other variation, seeing as how K3 ends in sort of a strange way. The last phrase of K3 is

“X CAN YOU SEE ANYTHING Q ?”

I would assume that because of the Q at the end of the sentence, it is hard to be sure if K3 really ends after the question mark, and not somewhere before. Obviously, I think that there are 97 letters, because I felt pretty confident naming this blog after them. Hopefully I don’t change my mind since I’m all set up here, but anyway- let me explain why I think this.

Yes, it is weird to have that stray Q there. But you know what else is weird? That X at the beginning. K2 had X’s between every sentence (probably because it was supposed to read like a telegram), but that is the only X in K3, and so I don’t think that Sanborn was trying to seperate sentences with X’s like he was in K2. I think that it is supposed to read “Can you see anything between X and Q?”

Recently I bought a copy of “Tomb of Tutankhamen” by Howard Carter, which is the source of the plaintext in K3 (augmented a little, of course). In any case, after being asked if he could see anything, Carter replies “wonderful things.” Maybe we are supposed to see the phrase “wonderful things” between an X and a Q somewhere?

I am positive that this has been observed by plenty of people in the past, like many things I am going to observe / try/ write about on this blog, but give me a break because I am only a college senior and just found out about this thing a few months ago, and plus, I thought that since I titled my blog with the number of letters I think are in Kryptos, it should be one of the first things I write about.

Lastly, I just added a link titled “Some Very Telling Quotes” to a list of quotes I put together to the sidebar under “Important Posts.” It’s only a handful right now but I plan on adding to it over time.

introductions

I’m Katherine Miller and this is my brand new blog about K4. This semester I am enrolled in a three credit special topics course on unsolved ciphers under the guidance of Dr. Brooke Stephens. My goals are as follows:

1. To spend a significant amount of time navigating the enormous depths of information on Kryptos and theories for solving K4, and compile my favorite and what I believe to be the most useful and interesting information into a well organized and easily readable indexed collection of knowledge that may be helpful to those just learning about Kryptos, as I was just a few months ago.
2. To familiarize myself with the methods of cryptanalysis currently being tried on K4, as well as those that have been tried unsuccessfully. Additionally I hope to devise some of my own theories, and be able to carry out experiments that may shed some light on what types of methods are and aren’t likely to have been used to encrypt K4.
3. To (hopefully!) be a functioning part of the Kryptos community with even a super small contribution to the efforts to solve K4.

I think, as most people do, that it is absolutely fascinating that a cipher which has been sitting at the Central Intelligence Agency for over 15 years has not been cracked despite the fact that the CIA is supposed to employ the best and brightest. Additionally fascinating is the fact that this sculpture has gained such worldwide fame and yet, not a single mathematician, computer scientist, or even puzzle fanatic has managed to crack K4 (that we know of). Because of this I certainly do not predict that in the course of the semester I will be able to even scratch the surface of cracking K4, but like other fans of this mysterious puzzle I am going to try everything I can think of out of sheer fascination and curiosity, and record it here. This way I will have an easily maintained and searchable record of my thoughts and a place to compile my lists of quotes, clues, and other information that I think should be together in lists.

Originally I was going to make this blog private or password protected, because I didn’t plan to have anyone else access it besides myself and my professor Dr. Stephens. However I’ve noticed that there are many people with personal Kryptos blogs and websites (my favorites listed on the right), and thought that it might be nice to join the club. While we can’t be sure that the solution to K4 will come out of a collaboration, it is not as much fun to work alone : )