How do ciphers and cryptic texts that aren’t digital get broken? Like the Zodiac killer’s for example
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Zodiac killer was a simple replacement cipher.** So you just guess “all triangles are E’s, all squares are T’s” or something and you fill them in, then keep guessing symbol+letter pairs until you get a cohesive message. If the message is too short you might have several solutions that can fit, and you may be out of luck.
You can use smart guesses too. For example, in english you’re likely to get combos like “and” or “the” either on their own or as a part of a word. So look for a 3 set of symbols and start with those guesses.
Also if the symbol repeats, it’s unlikely to be an x or a j, and is more likely an n or an s, etc. This gives you a “substitution key”.
Lots of more sophisticated ciphers or code are attacked with frequency analysis. For any language you are expected to use certain ratios and frequencies of specific nouns and vowels. If you’re trying to break the US Pacific fleet code in ww2, you look for what letters are used most (probably e and a) and words like island, water, and fuel.
Better codes hide this.
**apparently the Zodiac wasn’t a simple replacement cipher, it was a bit more complex. But its still a lot of “guess a starting point, follow it through, see if it works”
He include a “scramble” (not sure if thats the real term) where you read it in a specific order, (different than left to right, top to bottom). So you might have to try it backwards, or some geometric pattern.
While I dont know to many specifics, the zodiac one is this link(This is actually the guy the solved it and this was uploaded before the fbi confirmed it) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1oQLPRE21o&ab_channel=DavidOranchak
If it’s a simple cipher then you can look for clues in letter patterns–for instance, in English the most commonly used letter is E, followed by T, A, O and N in that order, so you look for the most commonly-used symbols in the cipher and see if substituting them for those letters gives you anything readable. This obviously doesn’t work for more complex ciphers.
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