Jim Sanborn couldn’t believe it. He was weeks away from auctioning off the answer to Kryptos, the sculpture he created for the CIA that had defied solution for 35 years. As always, wannabe solvers kept on paying him a $50 fee to offer their guesses to the remaining unsolved portion of the 1,800-character encrypted message, known as K4—wrong without exception. Then, on September 3, he opened an email from the latest applicant, Jarett Kobek, which started, “I believe the text of K4 is as follows …” He’d seen words like this thousands of times before. But this time, the text was correct.
“I was in shock,” Sanborn tells me. “Real
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