160
boxed numbers was
34, 68, 102, 136, 170, 204, 237, 270,...
The first six are all successive multiples of 34 but after that, the following two increments are only 33. However, this suggested that the letters should be put in rows of 34, and this seemed to link in with the right hand arrow with the number 340 next to it. When I did this, the first marker of four zeros occurred after exactly 33 lines, which also gave meaning to the down arrow with the number 330. It did not take long to then confirm that there were 1122(-34x33) letters between each marker of four zeros. Thus it seemed that the letters should be written out in blocks with 34 columns and 33 rows. A second important step of progress had been made, but there was still no story to be read.
Digraphs. With all the letters now arranged in blocks, some sort of rearrangement of the letters into text was required. But how? One approach was to search for digraphs (pairs of letters). In a long piece of text, the frequency of adjacent pairs of letters can also be determined and again has a characteristic pattern. The most frequent digraphs are TH and HE [1]. So I took the blocks, paired letters in several different ways and counted the frequency of the pairs, hoping that if I got the combination right, the pairs TH and HE would appear at the top of the frequency list. But nothing that I tried seemed quite right. Another approach was to take each letter T and determine the position of every H in a block relative to the T and add up frequencies of positions, hoping to find the relative position where H occurred most frequently. However, this method did not give consistent results either. Another idea was to check for the first letter of a pair in the first block and the second letter in the second block. Still no joy. One problem with using a computer to check for patterns is that it is best when checking for regular patterns, which had brought no success. It is not so easy to check for irregular patterns.
Keywords. It was time to go back to the diary and look for more clues. I tried to find some hints from the instructions on the first page about how to use the 'Tables' for multiplication but could find nothing there. Also on the front page, at the bottom, was written the two names.
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