[ALUmnus]

Or simply need more stimulating bathroom reading material?

Take a crack at this. This was a sculpture called KRYPTOS made for the CIA back in 1990. It's written in code, and the entire thing still hasn't been solved, even though thousands have been trying to crack it.

Sanborn finished the sculpture in time for a November 1990 dedication. The agency released the enciphered text, and a frenzy erupted in the crypto world as some of the best—and wackiest—cryptanalytic talent set to work. But it took them more than seven years, not the few months Sanborn had expected, to crack sections K1, K2, and K3. The first code breaker, a CIA employee named David Stein, spent 400 hours working by hand on his own time. Stein, who described the emergence of the first passage as a religious experience, revealed his partial solution to a packed auditorium at Langley in February 1998. But not a word was leaked to the press. Sixteen months later, Jim Gillogly, an LA-area cryptanalyst used a Pentium II computer and some custom software to crack the same three sections. When news of Gillogly's success broke, the CIA publicized Stein's earlier crack.

Here's the full code and key:

The 97 characters of K4 remain impenetrable. They have become, as one would-be cracker calls it, the Everest of codes.

The first three quadrant translations are in the article. Have at it!!

http://www.wired.com/science/discoverie ... ntPage=all