Pillar 6

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Pillar 6 in daytime

Pillar 6 contains a dot-dash cipher (Solved), a series of Enigma-style rotor scrambling wheels, two lines of alpha text (Unsolved) and a series of numbers around the bottom which probably form part of a cipher (Unsolved).

Dot Dash Grid - Solved

Large view of the Dot Dash Grid

The the grid is represented in dots and dashes, the best way to represent it is in binary, with a 1 for a dash and a 0 for a dot.

1010001000001010001100110110010110010010010110100111

0011000111111000100010111110000000111101000000101100

0000100000000000101010000000001000000010001000100000

1011111111110011101000100110010110100010011011101000

1001111100110110010010000000100000011000001011111010

0000000000000010100000001000001000100000101000000000

1010001110011001111001111100100111101101001011001001

0001111010001000100111100010100010101111101000110010

0000001000000010000000001010101000000000100010000010

0111010110000010100110101010111111011000001000111100

0011100010011010000010111110110010110111110101000010

1000001000001010001000000000001000000000000000001000

1011011110011011110010010110001001000110100111110110

1111000010001000000110110001011000100111000000111101

0000101000101010100000001010000010101000001000000000

A solution given by Glenn McIntosh on the Nkrypt Facebook page in the wee hours of 11 March 2013 is as follows:

Each character is encoded as a 2x3 array of bits, with low order bits at the top. The bit order in each 2x3 array is:

01

23

45


This gives a text output (though you have to traverse it labyrinth style):

AMPILLEATSTONEBRANLYBRAUNC

EKOOCOHWYADARAFRAYDARUOMED

AILWEBERGINGSTURGEONTESLAV

ROFREHTUAREMMEOSGNILLIHCSD

MORSERUSSHENRYHERTZMARCONI


The plaintext is a list of scientists and inventors, many if not all connected to electrical communications technology. Starting bottom left:

"Morse, Rutherford, Schilling, Soemmering, Sturgeon, Tesla, Vail, Weber, Wheatstone, Branly, Braun, Campillo, Cooke, DeMoura, Dyar, Faraday, Gauss, Henry, Hertz, Marconi"

Rotor Wheels

The pillar has four Enigma-style rotor wheels, and one reflector wheel. Above the first rotor wheel is the alphabet. The four rotor wheels move freely between incremental stops. The reflector wheel is fixed in position. Each wheel (including reflector) has triangular markings that can be aligned, presumably to indicate a starting rotor position.

Rotor wiring was determined by visiting the sculpture and following each "wire" with a fingernail, and marking where it terminated. I was quite diligent to get it right, and I did run a few checks after typing it all out that seem to indicate that they're correct (no duplicates etc) - but there's always a chance I have it wrong.

Rotor 1 "wiring"

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

UDBCFGEJHILMKTSNOPQRWXYZAV

Rotor 2 "wiring"

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

BZCXWHIFGLMJKVUPSQRTONEDYA

Rotor 3 "wiring"

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

ZADEFGCHMIJKLOPQRNWSTUVBXY

Rotor 4 "wiring"

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

BDFCEGIJKLSMAZNHOPQRTVXUWY

Reflector "wiring"

ABCDEFGJNOPSVW

ZYVMLIHKURQTCX

Reflector "wiring" with duplicates/pairs

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

ZYVMLIHGFKJEDURQPOTSNCXWBA

Alphabetic code

There are two lines of text below the rotor wheels. They read:

DL BIOB AXQC NLPA MNXE SBNT FJLD

KH JAWS FDHD MATX EJHM PVUJ XJOM

Base

A string of numbers run in a circular pattern around the base

10 10 11 12 11 13 14 15 30 30 17 18 12 12 8 10 14 14 19 22 12 12 11 13 7 7 8 8 14 17

see notes on Pillar 8