The "Antipodes" sculpture, which includes sections from the C.I.A.'s "Kryptos," on the National Mall in D.C. (Michael Yew/flickr)
Jim Sanborn has spent nearly 20 years watching his cryptography sculpture, "Kryptos," sit only partially-solved in the C.I.A.'s headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Sanborn recently released a clue for people attempting to decipher the enigmatic and beautiful piece of sculpture (spoiler alert): one of the words in the unsolved 97-letter section is ... "BERLIN."
Joining us to discuss the puzzle, its significance, and her years of observation on the code's followers is Elonka Dunin, a game developer and co-founder of the Kryptos Discussion Group, for people attempting to solve the cipher.
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Comments [4]
One other thing of significance is that Jim Sanborn chose to release the clue on November 22, the 47th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. I bore that in mind when solving the puzzle. The 22nd of November and Berlin have Kennedy in common. It was then a matter of finding what is common to Kennedy and Berlin and is comprised of 97 characters. Of course it has to be the famous quote from the speech Kennedy gave in Berlin.
Sorry for any confusion. I put below my final corrected conjecture:
Given the clue of Berlin and the character count, I presume the section decodes to (minus the outermost quotation marks and spaces)
"And, therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words “Ich bin ein Berliner.” John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Berlin 1963"
(I've not yet tried to decode it to see if I'm correct)
Paul Sagi
Kuala Lumpur
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Fertilize a Mind - Plant an Idea
The geeks shall inherit the earth.
There are 1Ø types of people in the world: Those who understand binary and those who don't.
There's no place like ::1 and 127.Ø.Ø.1
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Instead of a comma after Berlin I think instead there should be a period after Berliner.
Given the clues of Berlin and the character count, I presume the section decodes to (minus the outermost quotation marks and spaces)
"And, therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words “Ich bin ein Berliner” John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Berlin 1963"
(I've not yet tried to decode it to see if I'm correct)
Paul Sagi
**********************************************************************************************************
Fertilize a Mind - Plant an Idea
The geeks shall inherit the earth.
There are 1Ø types of people in the world: Those who understand binary and those who don't.
There's no place like ::1 and 127.Ø.Ø.1
**********************************************************************************************************
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