I’m not totally sold on the palindromes either but it is interesting theory that does have some merit. If a studied cryptologist made this sculpture and developed the code I would say no way on the Palindrome thing with all its holes and exceptions but this code was produced by an amateur at best. JS’s motivation was the art aspect and what that art is telling us. I imagine it was more important to him to maintain the integrity of the art and its meaning not necessarily the integrity of the code. Forcing the code to work with a few tweaks and twists to maintain the integrity of the art was probably ok with him- opposed to a die hard crypto guy who would want the code to be as perfect as possible. I read all these high math ideas throughout the YAHOO: Kryptos group for solving K4 and I chuckle a bit because I feel like people are forgetting who made this code. A guy who had to have a crash course over a small period of time and from that abbreviated instruction created a sculpture with multiple codes one of which he had enough confidence to make his own tweaks to. Adding a masking technique to say a vigenere by making the pass key a 97 character string of characters would be enough to make it virtually impossible to crack and pretty simple to create for an amateur. The hardest part for JS would be where to hide the pass key string and I believe this where Sanborn’s visual element come into play and Scheidt’s comment about Steganography apply.
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