MODERATORS NOTE: Sam Blake, who developed the Wolfram Language code, wrote about his work at Wolfram Blog: "The Solution of the Zodiac Killer’s 340-Character Cipher".
https://blog.wolfram.com/2021/03/24/the-solution-of-the-zodiac-killers-340-character-cipher
A quote from Discover Magazine mentioning that Mathematica was used to crack the Zodiac Killer's 50-year-old cipher:
https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/how-mathematicians-cracked-the-zodiac-killers-cipher
In the late 1960s, a serial killer self-identifying as “the Zodiac” killed at least five people in Northern California and claimed to have murdered more. In November 1969, the Zodiac Killer sent a card to the San Francisco Chronicle containing a 340-character secret message that for more than 50 years went unsolved by detectives, cryptography experts, amateur sleuths and curious others.
Wonder no more, true-crime aficionados.
After months of crunching code during the pandemic, three researchers on three different continents announced that they’d finally decoded the message. Further bolstering the claim, experts at the FBI verified the solution (and even tweeted about it). The encrypted message didn’t reveal the identity of the Zodiac, but it did bring decades of speculation, conspiracy theories and guesswork to a dramatic close...
“It took a lot of computational effort, and it’s been a real source of frustration for a lot of people,” says computer programmer David Oranchak in Roanoke, Virginia, who has a background in cryptography and coordinated the effort. He’s spent years fielding theories from misguided, would-be sleuths about the meaning of the 340-character code and the identity of its author. “So many people conjure coincidences out of thin air, and the more coincidences they generate, the stronger their evidence.”
Oranchak sent [the] solution to contacts at the FBI, and by the end of 2020, the FBI had verified the methodology and results. In March 2021, Blake wrote about how he’d used Mathematica, a math software package, for his part, and in January, van Eycke made headlines again when he cracked an unsolved 386-year-old code composed by a Dutch scientist.
Cracking the 340-character cipher was so computationally heavy, says Oranchak, that no one in 1969 could likely have decoded the Zodiac’s message — which suggests the killer didn’t know just how difficult a code he’d created. In addition, he notes that today’s codes, like the ones that secure smartphone apps or transmit information online, would never fall to such a brute force effort like the one used by Oranchak and his collaborators.
