Zenith 2026.1 is Out!

This release is primarily a major quality-of-life improvement as I work to resurrect this project from the dust. All tools and dependencies should be on the latest versions, a lot of usability enhancements have been added, and it showcases the ability to crack ciphers that involve ciphertext transformations such as the Z340.

Major Framework & Dependency Upgrades

Upgraded Angular from earlier versions to 21
Upgraded Angular Material from earlier versions to 21
Upgraded to Spring Boot 3.x and Java 25 (plus multiple intermediate Spring Boot upgrades)
Migrated large parts of the backend API to GraphQL (including websocket solver, fitness functions, transformers, statistics, and more)

Core Features & Crypto Improvements

Implemented first draft of transformer language model in Rust
Split training and inference into separate binaries
Added necessary ciphertext transformers to support decipherment of the Z340
Made transformer configurations cipher-specific
Supported arbitrarily high n-gram counts (including higher-order n-grams)
Show the best solution on the UI at each epoch

Genetic Algorithm & Solver Enhancements

Implemented multi-objective genetic algorithm (with sort by crowding, divergent GA, lattice population support, etc.)
Refactored genetic algorithm to operate over genomes instead of chromosomes
Added new breeder implementations, invasive species feature, fitness sharing improvements, entropy toggle, truncation selector, and more
Fixed various concurrency, evaluation, crossover, and selector bugs in the GA

UI / Frontend Improvements

Converted help page to static UI (removed expansion panel)
Fixed numerous margin/padding/layout deficiencies
Fixed introduction tour and related service issues
Converted BehaviorSubjects → signals + various UI bug fixes
Removed Google tracking, default intro, page transitions, and unused services/components

Static Site & Documentation

Implemented and migrated to a Hugo-based static site (with Stack theme)
Enforced HTTPS, updated baseURL (scheme, trailing slash, domain), moved content to /public
Updated markdown documentation for humans and agents

Bug Fixes & Stability

Fixed configuration loading issues with ng serve
Fixed cipher transformations not applying on initial load or import
Fixed various build issues (Angular 19 changes, Maven/Angular integration, output paths, etc.)
Fixed linting (TypeScript), typos in workflows, and concurrency problems in GA optimizer
Made websocket connections more robust
Various clean-ups, refactors, and merge-related commits (multi-objective branch, dependabot updates, etc.)

Coming Soon

A transformer based language model written in Rust to evaluate solution candidates
Supporting tooling and changes in pursuit of cracking the Hampton ciphers, written primarily in Rust

Photo by Fotis Fotopoulos on Unsplash