This page is a description of the premises that were used in my work along with the evidence that was used to support them. This page also contains some discussion regarding premises in general as well as the philosophy of applying them.
The path to the “APEX” of Kryptos is reached via the links on the left, starting with “Step 1: The Palimpsest”. Along that path, you will find that I make a concerted effort to interpret as many of the known clues as I can. I start with some controversial premises (e.g. that K4 might require a multi-step process that no field operative would typically be expected to use) interpret the clues, and analyze the results. Some very surprising “Easter Eggs” are found on my path, which is good, because even a relatively short multi-step encryption becomes impossible unless there are breadcrumbs along the way.
Meanwhile, as promised, here is a discussion of premises...
Premises in the Kryptos Community
In the three (plus) years that I have been involved with the Kryptos community, I have observed many different schools of thought, some compatible and others mutually exclusive. And the community members themselves are very - shall we say - fascinating in many different ways.
I have observed members that would put their foot down and proclaim “the solution to K4 will have no science or statistics involved whatsoever”, while other members proclaim that it will in no way be “artsy-fartsy”. And I have observed some members demand complicated methodologies for the solution while others require the opposite, i.e. something that a field-operative would appreciate employing. Sometimes the disputes get downright nasty, with words like “failure” and “insane” (and worse) carelessly tossed about.
Below, I’ll get into the details of where my premises fall amongst these camps, and I’ll provide some justification too. But first I want to point out one thing: I acknowledge that my premises were not preordained, and that I must test their veracity as best I can. I will never deny another’s results entirely on the basis of disagreement with my premises, no matter how motivated my premises may be. Even if someone were to bring forth a technique based on examining chicken entrails (thanks for that hilarious hypothetical, Dan A!) if the results could somehow shown to be worthy, then I would have to pick myself up off of the floor (upon which I fainted) and acknowledge the work.
I believe that in order to solve K4, we need the capacity to hold (at least) two opposing thoughts in our minds at the same time. So while one thought may seem astronomically more likely, we cannot discard the alternative completely from the realm of the possible (unless it truly is impossible). Oh, by all means, concentrate your efforts on the thought that you deem most reasonable, or most practical, or most convenient, or most “whatever-you-want”, and ignore the rest. But realize that this does not grant you license to “debunk” other thoughts (or other people) on that basis alone. Premises are for testing, not for worship or condemnation. If you worship yours and condemn mine, or if I do the same in reverse, then we are only hurting our chances to solve the problem. And in my opinion, that epitomizes the concept of “How to Fail at Kryptos”.
So, having said all of that, let’s turn from the general philosophy of premises to the specific concepts that influenced mine...
Multi-step Methods
The path that I am about to show you has many steps, which is one of the qualities that have encouraged other researchers to automatically dismiss it as “false”, “foolhardy”, or even “insane”. Many of them base their objections on the premise that “K4 cannot possibly be this hard”. Later, I’ll describe for you why I believe that the only thing “hard” about my approach is accepting the premises to begin with and then using both left and right brained concepts to work together towards a solution. Meanwhile, here are a few quotes from Kryptos’ creators that serve as motivation for my approach:
• “There are lots of doors to go through to get to the meaning of the code. Every time you enter one doorway you might, in the distance, see another door. You go through that doorway and then you go through another doorway. It unfolds as it's deciphered.”
-Jim Sanborn (from November, 2005 CNN Jamie McIntyre video)
• “There are many layers. A lot of thought went into this. There is more to the puzzle than what's been talked about.”
-Ed Scheidt (from Elonka Dunin’s 2003 road trip)
• “I would think five or six [cryptographic techniques were used].”
-Jim Sanborn, excerpt from interview in Wired Magazine
Based on these quotes as well as the fact that there are so many potential clues (misspellings, raised letters, tantalizing Morse Code, mysterious plaintext, etc) that are yet unreconciled, I have decided to explore the premise that K4 is a multi-step process. If that is a proper interpretation, then the first quote implies that at each stage of the process, we should be able to somehow verify that we have passed through a “doorway” and then study the available clues and/or data for hints about what the next step should be. Such is my premise: the solution of K4 is a multistage process that employs clues and “Easter Eggs” to keep us on the “straight and narrow”. If you are already discounting my work because this premise violates one of your own, then won’t you please share the reasons why your premise deserves to be treated as a “fact”? Even failing that, I still respect your thoughts to the contrary and am willing to review any interesting observations that result from them.
Left and Right Brained Methods
The next concept that I would like to address is the left-brained vs. right-brained dispute. As I mentioned above, there are those who assert that K4 will be solved only by pure cryptographic techniques, much like has been done with K1-K3, as well as other Sanborn work. (I think of this as left-brained, because of its relationship to math, logic, linear analysis, etc.) Then there are those who assert the opposite, i.e. that no statistics or standard cryptographic techniques were used to encode K4 and that we should be seeking more abstract, visual, interpretive methods. The most popular argument given for this is that Jim Sanborn is an “artist” as opposed to a “real cryptographer”. I fail to be compelled by that argument for so many reasons that I lose count. (The mere existence of K1-K3 should be enough to give that argument fits, because even if the explanation is that Ed Scheidt provided those techniques, who is to say that Ed Scheidt didn’t provide some more?)
Now, I can certainly appreciate that the folks in these camps believe their concepts to be more probable than the alternatives (a “premise of likelihood”). And I can even appreciate that some folks might adopt a right-brained stance because they are mathematically challenged, or a left-brained stance because they have never seen a “cloud animal” in their entire lives (a “premise of convenience”). But I have been appalled to watch these camps reject one another so rapidly and conclusively without appealing to any facts.
I believe that both camps are seriously underestimating Mr Sanborn, in terms of what he is capable of doing and what he is likely to do. He was commissioned to do a mysterious piece for the CI-freaking-A! If Sanborn were Michelangelo, then this is his Sistine Chapel! All of your mundane, timid, and easily daunted bets are off.
Why don’t we see what Jim Sanborn has to say about this issue:
• “Mr. Scheidt basically gave me an outline of historic and contemporary ... encoding systems that have been formally used by the agency and were still used by the agency and other people [in 1990]. He gave me a whole variety of possible systems to use and ways to modify all of those systems. But as a visual artist, I like to rely on systems that include visual as well as digital material that can be deciphered by machines. It's also well-known that I did use some matrix codes Ed gave me, and I have also designed visual systems for encoding, which are much harder for cryptographers to crack because they're individualistic.”
-Jim Sanborn, excerpt from interview in Wired Magazine
Based on this quote it seems plain to me that Sanborn is acknowledging use of left-brained systems (provided by Ed) as well as right-brained systems (the individualistic “visual” systems). So I have decided to allow for both left-brained AND right-brained techniques amongst the various steps of my approach for K4.
Now, the above quotes have been around for a long time, and everyone in the community has seen them, so I haven’t shed any new light on these schools of thought just by regurgitating these quotes. My observation is that these camps simply interpret troublesome aspects of these quotes to be related to the other (i.e. non-K4) aspects of Kryptos. That is, the left-brained people assert that the visual concepts are reserved for whatever mysteries lie beyond K4 (whose existence has been indicated by Sanborn) while the right-brained people assert that the mathematical stuff was taken care of in K1- K3. Meanwhile, the “K4 can’t be that hard” people assert that the quotes regarding multiple “doorways” are likewise referring to Kryptos in its entirety and definitely not K4. That’s all fine and well, but I must remind once again: these are premises only, so you can’t go wielding them as if they were facts.
Premises That Are About (or are themselves) Clues
While generic quotes such as those above are abundant, quotes that specifically refer to clues - or even introduce new ones - are much more rare (and precious). Consider this clue regarding the misspellings that are present in each of the plaintext sections of K1-K3:
• “When I asked about the misspellings and asked if they were accidental or deliberate, Sanborn said that they were deliberate, but it was less important *what* they were. He said, and I quote: "it's more the orientation of those letters that's useful there." Later on in the evening he repeated that point, saying it was the "positioning" that was important.”
- Elonka Dunin, post to Kryptos Group
This is a very important piece of information that confirms that the misspellings are indeed an important clue. (Prior to that, we knew only that they were potential clues, but that they also could have just been inserted to confuse the decryption efforts, provide a distraction, or both.) Furthermore, the quote suggests that before going off to think about which letters were misspelled, or which incorrect letters replaced them, or even how those letters might be related to one another via any one of the myriad encryption techniques, perhaps you should pay attention to where the misspellings are located in relationship to either the whole piece or one another, or both. Therefore, I have adopted a premise that somehow the locations of these misspellings will come into play for solution of K4.
And here is a quote that introduces a whole new clue:
• “Getting back to Kryptos, Sanborn commented that he was surprised that no one had tried recovering the original matrix and running it through all possible shifts.”
- Elonka Dunin, post to Kryptos Group
This is an amazing quote. The creator of Kryptos himself is describing not only an avenue of attack, but he is also expressing surprise that it hadn’t already been tried. If he were truly surprised by that, then I imagine that he is completely gobsmacked that a significant fraction of Kryptos fanatics are still not trying it, even after he laid it out there! This is just about as close as one gets to a premise that is preordained. In other words, we know now that we need to recover something called the “original matrix” and also that “all possible shifts” should be employed in order to notice something. So I adopted as a premise that I need to find this “original matrix” and that manual manipulations are part of the process. This is a given, per Sanborn. The only question is whether this is referring to the “solving K4” process or the “after K4” mystery. My current premise is that it is necessary for solving K4.
And, finally, there is this:
• “I will say that I have left instructions in the earlier text that refer to later text.”
- Jim Sanborn, excerpt from interview in Wired Magazine
Well, now that is another amazing new clue. Certainly folks had already entertained the notion that the intriguing plaintext of the solved sections might be relevant, but this simple quote is saying much more than that. It says that the text is absolutely important, that we can reconcile some early text with later text, and that after having done so the relationship is to be treated as instructions. Instructions regarding later text. I’ll therefore adopt a premise that some textual manipulations are anticipated and that the instructions to perform them appear fairly early in the text.
My Complete Set of Starting Premises
So prior to taking even one step along the path of solving K4, I adopt the following set of premises:
1) Solving K4 will involve a multi-step process (the “doorways”) that will contain veiled clues (aka “breadcrumbs”, or “easter eggs”) along the way to keep you on path.
2) Solving K4 will involve a mixture of cryptographic steps and “individualistic” visual steps.
3) Solving K4 will require paying attention to the locations of the misspelled characters.
4) Solving K4 will require formation of an “original matrix”, and will require matrix shifts somewhere along the way.
5) Solving K4 will also involve textual interpretation which provides instructions regarding manipulation of later text.
Perhaps you agree with the reasoning above but differ only in that I should replace “solving K4” with “solving Kryptos”. That is fine. If you apply those and then return with a representative methodology that provides some fascinating results, I will be more than happy to help you follow up.
While the 5 premises above were available to me prior to beginning my work, another premise arose at a later time. You will get a chance to see how it was motivated at about step 4, but I give it to you now just for advance warning:
6) Solving K4 will require interpretation of the K1, K3, and K2 plaintext (in that order).
How Hard is This Path (Really?)
After reviewing my original write-up, Gary Phillips, a highly visible member of the Kryptos community, asked me the following question: “what are the odds that anyone else would have found the same path that you did?” At the time, I ignored the question, because I felt that it was irrelevant. But since that time, I have come to better appreciate the point of his question, because I have seen a lot of far-fetched, unmotivated, approaches that if (somehow!) correct could only have been stumbled upon by blind luck. I hope that that is not what Gary thinks of my work, but given the state of my original write-up, I find it plausible. Regardless of the motivation for the question, as I have said, I have come to appreciate his question much more since the time it was posed. Allow me to rephrase it this way: “If Jim Sanborn really did construct K4 in this way, then what the heck was he thinking, because it’s freaking impossible, and anyone that stumbles along this path is both crazy and lucky!?!?” So, I have recently revisited the question from Sanborn’s perspective, and I think I have some good answers for it.
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•I think that Sanborn expected the community to be a little more open-minded with regard to possibilities, so that we wouldn’t reject things out-of-hand, but at the same time very discriminating with regard to results, so that we wouldn’t fall for just anything.
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• I think that Sanborn expected us to be confident when we found his “breadcrumbs” and to work together toward solution.
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•I think that Sanborn expected us to take some time figuring out how to start the game (get to the point where the interpretation begins) but once there follow the easy clues and recognize the Easter Eggs.
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•I think that Sanborn accepted some of Ed Scheidt’s matrix systems to introduce some cryptographic challenges along the way.
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•I think that Sanborn never dreamed it would be this hard because he never dreamed that our close-mindedness and singular drive to go it alone (i.e. to be “the one”) would be the huge obstacles that they are.
In other words, I don’t think that what I have done is very hard at all if we would have teamed up, used both left and right brains, and followed the clues and results more so than our own biased premises.
Therefore, I am suggesting that we team up, ease our constraints, and solve K4 together. For that purpose, I am forming a team: call it “Team APEX” for reasons that become clear later. While I would surely like some folks to focus on “moving the ball” forward from where I left it, I would be just as happy to see folks form more focused, logical and experimental teams, while allowing for possibilities that seem either unlikely or daunting.
And I am hoping that you, dear Reader, will join “Team APEX” after reading my work.
