Random Scientists Recreated Zodiac Killer's Mind And It'll Write Poetry With You (10 items)

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  (#7) The Team Believes Ross Sullivan May Have Been The Killer

  Sullivan's name has been suggested by amateur Zodiac investigators for years. He matches the scant description given to Northern California police, and he was in the area at the time of the murders, but it's unknown if he was ever labeled an official suspect.

  On the first episode of The Hunt for the Zodiac Killer, the team's field investigators discover that Sullivan was a suspect in the murder of Cheri Jo Bates (which matched Zodiac's MO), and that he worked a short walk away from where the woman was killed. 

  The most damning piece of evidence against Sullivan is that he was studying cryptography on the Riverside campus. If the murder of Bates was one of his early crimes, then it makes sense that he wouldn't have had all his methods worked out at that point.

  After multiple hospitalizations for mental health problems, Sullivan dropped off the map completely. It's been theorized that he passed away in 1977 while living in Santa Cruz, three years after the final Zodiac post card. 
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  (#3) How AI Codebreaking Works

  At the onset of The Hunt for the Zodiac Killer, Kevin Knight, the expert in natural language processing who helped develop CARMEL, explains the way that his system works and it's somehow both incredibly complicated and fairly straightforward.

  The program looks through a billion English words pulled from online material that is related to what it's researching. It then analyzes various letter statistics in order to discern "what good language looks like." By doing this, Knight explains, CARMEL is looking for a key that it can apply to Z340. 

  Not only have Knight and his team fed all of Zodiac's writings into the computer, they're uploading any and all information about the killer, so as to give the AI a better idea of what kind of person Zodiac was. This list of documents includes the killer's height, weight, and evidence from the killer's multiple crime scenes. 

  According to Knight, the longer the code, the easier it is to crack, as the program has more data to work with. For example, a 750,000-word code like the Copiale Cipher is bound to have a few words that repeat. Once the program figures out a repeated word, it can start plugging that word into different sentences in order to discern what the words around it mean. 

   
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  (#2) Kevin Knight Has Used AI To Crack Some Seriously Tough Codes

  The creator of CARMEL isn't some fly-by-night scientist who thinks he can run Z340 through his computer and come out with the original Zodiac text; he's a a proven talent in the world of cryptography. Before attempting to solve the Zodiac case he used CARMEL to decode the Copiale Cipher, a 105-page book featuring 75,000 complex, handwritten characters that sat unsolved since the 18th century.

  The only pieces of the text that weren't encoded were “Philipp 1866,” written at the start of the manuscript, and “Copiales 3” at the end. The Copiale Cipher was solved after a chance meeting between Kevin Knight and the cipher's owner, Christiane Schaefer.

  There were number of missteps along the way, but it only took Knight a few weeks to crack the cipher. Inside, he discovered that the cipher belonged to the Great Enlightened Society of Oculists, a secret Germanic order that was obsessed with the human eye. According to the group's internal writings, they even performed an early eye surgery. 
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  (#6) The AI Can Compare Multiple Handwritten Letters

  After the investigators in Riverside discovered that the murderer of Cheri Jo Bates wrote a taunting letter to the local paper in the same style as the Zodiac Killer, they were able to obtain the document and send it to Knight and his team.

  Once Knight had the note, he fed it into the computer in order to figure out if the Riverside letter and Z340 — or any of the Zodiac letters — were written by the same individual. Using a program called OCR (optical character recognition) that scans images and converts them into searchable text, they were able to make an eerie discovery.

  During the opening episode of The Hunt for the Zodiac Killer the team discovers that both Zodiac and the Bates's killer used words and phrases in a similar manner. The most amazing discovery was that a Zodiac letter and the Bates's letter used the word "twitch" but spelled it "twich." Knight was quick to point out that there's only a one in a one-point-five million chance of this happening, making the discovery on par with uncovering a sample of the killer's fingerprints. 
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  (#5) CARMEL's Initial Discovery Caused Researchers To Rethink Zodiac's Code

  In the first episode of The Hunt for the Zodiac Killer, Knight and his researchers perform an initial investigation on Z340. Almost immediately, the program finds something interesting. While CARMEL didn't decipher a word, it did find an L-shaped pattern that repeated itself.

  After trying to figure out what this meant, the team realized that Zodiac may not have written from left to right (IE the way most English texts are written). They concluded that the message could be written from top to bottom, or using a variety of formats, making the cipher even more complicated. 
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  (#10) Here's A Brand New Zodiac Poem Just For You

  When you visit the poetry generating website that houses the same AI as CARMEL, you can actually have the computer write a poem for you. First, you set the parameters: How many lines do you want the poem to be? Should the poem be written in iambic pentameter, or should it be a haiku? Finally, what word do you want the AI to draw "inspiration" from? This poem uses the word "hole" as its catalyst. 

  "Not thinking anything about a pot, 
  Maybe there is something slightly sliding! 
  I never really had an easy spot, 
  Being bothered by the thought of climbing."

  Now imagine reading that on a car door at a crime scene. 

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