What’s this all About?

I’ve always been a proponent of learning by doing. My advice to others with any desire to learn programming, or really anything in general, is to find some problem or project that interests you and go try to solve or build it. You will learn best along the way, it will keep you interested, and the end result is something you can showcase to others such as potential employers.

This is therefore a hobby project born out of that need for myself, a purposeful reason to learn new technologies while working towards a meaningful goal. The goal in this case was to solve the Zodiac ciphers, being that at least until December 2020, the Zodiac 340 cipher had not yet been solved. So it was a moonshot project that kept me interested while implementing new approaches and technologies. Over time, I replaced obsolescing tech with fancy new tech, many times just because I could.

The project got dropped for a few years, as the Zodiac 340 cipher did in fact get solved in December 2020, so the main inspiration for me had fallen off a cliff. It did not get solved by me but by a much more deserving group of folks. During this time my kids were also very young, and I could barely find time to sleep, so hobby projects were not even an afterthought. I had a major surgery in 2023, and then projects at work kept me working late nights for quite a long stretch.

However this project did reach the point of being able to solve both of the popular Zodiac ciphers, so either way I had attained my goal. It’s something I’m proud of. It can solve the ciphers in as little as 50ms depending on hardware and hyperparameters. It can also do so using multiple types of optimization approaches, both simulated annealing and genetic algorithms. No modern AI has yet been implemented or needed, but that’s about to change.

I recently left a successful career and decided I need something once again to keep me interested while building new skills. Thus I have at least temporarily revived this project. My goal now is to solve the Hampton ciphers. Success would be icing on the cake, but the journey itself has enormous utility as proven out over more than a decade so far. It will never earn me a penny but has paid off by keeping me sharp throughout my software engineering career. I’m now going to need to implement some computer vision solutions and also some transformer based optimization methods, which I am excited to already be diving head first into.

I’ve made many recent updates which I will put into an official release very shortly, as I both pick up where I left off, modernize some things, and prepare it for the newest adventure.

I’ll either make some progress worth sharing, land a fulfilling role at a great company, or AI will exceed my means of doing both. We’ll see how it all plays out.