After watching a documentary on ciphers earlier today, the topic of the zodiac killer came up. I thought to myself, the crimes took place in the 60s, and the culprit could still be alive... I wonder if anyone has attempted to break the remaining messages which are still unsolved, by means of distributed computing.

Is anyone aware of any distributed computing projects relating to this? Would this be a suitable project for BIONIC?

What's BIONIC?

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Isn't that your fork? ;-)

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[OT]

What's BIONIC?

It's BOINC with double vision. :D

(It has two eyes, you see.)
[/OT]

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ralic's law of forums: Irrespective of any prior research done, you will find the solution to your question shortly after posting it to a public Internet forum, resulting in readers concluding that you have done no research on the matter whatsoever.

I have been wondering about using distributed networking to solve the zodiac ciphers for quite some time now. I have discussed it with a few people, but never got very far with it. I am currently involved with enigma@home as well as the original m4 project's software - and I fail to see why a similar approach could not be used in cracking the zodiac ciphers. Even if it were more like a networked version of zkdecrypto it would be better than nothing. Start with the 340 cipher and work our way through them. (or start with the 408 if you want to make sure the software works, as you'd have plaintext to compare the results to)

I like to suggest that BOINC alpha test is not suited to be listed as a BOINC Project. The Message Boards relating to this project and the project has not been active for months or years. There has been no WU's provided to the general public for well over a year. As Volunteers, why are we subjected to waste our time day in day out to check if there is WU's available or not if there is no intention to open the project to the general public or in deed there is no explanation why it was stopped in the first place.. Surely, there is sufficient indoor testers to carry out testing without wasting our time. Time to close it and declare it Retired Project.

Mr Anderson, you should know better that this is not a good way of advertising BOINC. The cost of volunteering is not cheap, you should consider the consequences...