Quadrant analysis, Part 2

[smithy Profile]

....because he was severely mentally ill...

Oh indeed yes, yes indeedy.

And if we take the symptoms of bi-polarity, we might be able to map him quite neatly. We might be able to recognise manic phases, grandiosity and perhaps even SAD in his behaviour. Maybe.
I think this is really worth looking at, but I don't think I want to go through all the Van Nuys stuff. Too lazy.
Is it in there?

Where have you gone Zab?

[entropy Profile]

Actually, smithy, Dr. Van Nuys draws a quite different diagnostic conclusion from reviewing Zodiac's letters in sequence. He suggests that Zodiac suffered from Dissociative Identity Disorder (formerly Multiple Personality Disorder) based on the radical changes in Z's handwriting, particularly the 1974 letters.

IF these letters were written by Zodiac, I believe it's a pretty compelling argument and not just because my POI suffered from it. Diagnosing Z might be a good topic for another thread. And now back to Quadrant Analysis...

[smithy Profile]

Actually, smithy, Dr. Van Nuys draws a quite different diagnostic conclusion from reviewing Zodiac's letters in sequence..... And now back to Quadrant Analysis...

Aye aye entropy, thanks for saving me the time of listening to them all. I listened to the first three Van Nuys's and when he actually started to talk about the letters (three minutes into the third one), he pretty soon offered the idea that Zodiac "might have been an outdoorsman" - so I stopped. From what you say, I'm now very pleased I did.
BTW your saying "IF these letters were written by Zodiac" would be another good topic for anyone who doubts it.....
Meantime, yes, back to quadrant analysis, where I'm sure there's plenty more to discuss.
I'm not sure how this terrible thread drift came in, tut tut.

[_pi Profile]

Revisiting this thread one year later…

I found an interesting similarity between the Z340 and the "PARADICE/SLAVES" panel of the Halloween card that might indicate that the cipher somehow needs to be interpreted using quadrants.

The following diagram shows the similarities that I will describe below:

340Quadrants.gif [ 47.52 KiB | Viewed 291 times ]

The HC panel is composed of the words "paradice" and "slaves" disposed in a cross shape, separating in quadrants the 4 phrases: "by fire", "by gun", "by knife" and "by rope".

Let's also split the Z340 in quadrants. The horizontal divider must be placed in the middle of the cipher (coincidentally or not, where there are 2 "dash" symbols that seem to suggest that the cipher should be split there). The vertical divider can be placed to the left or to the right of the 8th column.

Now let's look at the "+" symbols in the Z340 and how many there are per quadrant. From top-left to bottom right, there are respectively 7,6,5,6 "+" symbols per quadrant.

Going back to the HC panel, let's consider how many letters there are in each of the HC panel quadrants, in the same order: 6,5,7,6.

Although not in the same order, the number of "+" symbols per Z340 quadrant matches the number of letters in the HC panel quadrants.

The similarity doesn't end there. In the HC panel, the word "By" appears once in each quadrant. In 3 of the quadrants, the word "By" is written horizontally; in the other quadrant (the "by knife" one, containing 7 letters) it is written vertically. In the Z340, in 3 of the quadrants, 2 "+" symbols can be found side by side horizontally. In the remaining quadrant (the one with 7 "+" symbols) , such a pair is found and it is disposed vertically.

[doranchak Profile Website]

Interesting observations, pi. Perhaps more focused experiments on cipher text quadrants will be worthwhile.

You associated the upper left quadrant with KNIFE. To add to your observation about the matching number of "+" symbols, I see that the letters in "KNIFE" do appear in that quadrant. They also appear in the lower left quadrant, but not in either of the right quadrants. Dunno if that means anything.

Two more things I find interesting about the little Halloween crossword:

1) Even though the word KNIFE is longer than GUN, ROPE, and FIRE, he still decided to write it vertically AND to write "BY" vertically. He does not write "BY" vertically in the other quadrants. Why would he intentionally create such a lopsided / unbalanced grid?

2) The only backwards letter, N, appears in the KNIFE quadrant.

Why does he seem to give the KNIFE quadrant more attention than the others?

[_pi Profile]

1) Even though the word KNIFE is longer than GUN, ROPE, and FIRE, he still decided to write it vertically AND to write "BY" vertically. He does not write "BY" vertically in the other quadrants. Why would he intentionally create such a lopsided / unbalanced grid?

I always wondered why that "By" was vertical. That's in part what I found interesting in my above observation: having a 2-letter word horizontally in 3 quadrants and vertically in 1 quadrant and seeing a similar structure with the "+" symbols in the z340. It might be a way to subtly indicate that the HC is related to the z340.

The fact that the quadrants are not in the same order might indicate that they have to be moved around, flipped, rotated, etc. Who knows. So many possibilities, so little time... And what scares me the most is discarding an actual valid transposition because preliminary tests with ZKD weren't initially conclusive. Well, assuming a transposition has to be conducted in the first place...