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Typo Found in Kryptos CIA Sculpture

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the that's-a-big-oops dept.

SimuAndy writes "Elonka Dunin, game developer at Simutronics and author/editor of the new book, 'The Mammoth Book of Secret Codes and Cryptograms', reports that what everyone had thought was the answer to part 2 of the CIA's encrypted Kryptos sculpture, wasn't. Sculptor Sanborn announced this week that everyone had gotten it wrong, because of a mistake on the art piece. For more info, check out the Wired story, or the Kryptos Group announcement."

2 of 144 comments (clear)

  1. huh? by sentientbrendan · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The problematic part is at the end of part 2: "... forty-four seconds west. ID by rows." On April 19th, sculptor Sanborn contacted one of the Kryptos Group moderators to say, "No, that last part is wrong." He also indicated that there was a missing character on the sculpture, probably something that would have resulted in a plaintext "X" before that section. He said that he had thought that with the missing character, the section in question would have come out to be an unintelligible scramble. Instead, he was astounded to see that by sheer chance, the resulting random text had turned out to be apparently intelligible English, "ID BY ROWS", although that was not what was intended.

    what are the odds of that?

  2. Bad Title by MaceyHW · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It's not a "typo". According the wired article, Sanborn decided to leave out a single charater (an "x" serving as a "period") for asthetic reasons and this led to a faulty decryption of one phrase of the message.