– What is it about the Zodiac cyphers that make them so hard to solve?
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For a cypher to easy or even possible to solve the code must actually follow some pattern, and it would need to decode to something that makes sense. Basically, if the cyphers *are complete nonsense* you’re not going to be able to get any meaning from them.
You also need a certain amount of data to recognize patterns. If every symbol/letter could translate to *any* letter or number and you only see each one a few times, that’s basically random data and you can come up with many solutions but there is no way to prove which is right. With a larger amount of text, you could start to recognize patterns like – that symbol is very common, maybe it means E – or those symbols occur together a lot – maybe they mean T and H. Or this symbol *never* occurs without the other one following it – maybe they are Q and U.
But without enough words to start to see those patterns you have nothing to go on.
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