The Kryptos key is going for sale

Since artist James Sanborn has revealed Kryptos, an outdoor sculpture found in the CIA headquarters, the amateur and professionals cryptanics attempted to break the hidden code in his message of almost 1800 characters. While 3 of the 4 panels of the encrypted text in the SA in the shape of S -shaped art have decoded, the final panel, known as K4, still challenges the solution. Only a human being on Earth knows the message of K4: Sanborn. But soon someone else will join the club. Sanborn is putting the answer for sale.

“I am auctioning the clear text of K4, which is Kryptos’ secret,” says Sanborn. He is even throwing in a curved metal plate that he used as a cutting sample for the panel that is now in the agency.

Sanborn hinted that the secret was a possibility at the auction, recently in a March interview that he did with me. At the time, he was frustrated by the idiots triumphantly and in an incorrect way, claiming that he had broken the code with artificial intelligence.

But why now? “I wanted to be of healthy mind and body when it happened, so I was able to check it in some way,” says Sanborn, who is turning 80 in the period when the offers will start in November. He could also use the money. As a work artist, he does not have a huge pension account and is particularly worried that if he or his wife had undergone serious disability, they would have had to face significant financial challenges. Part of the proceeds, he says, will go to the programs for the disabled. The offer will be managed by RR Auction and the reserve, he says, should be around $ 300,000.

It is his hope and assumption that the winning bidder, after experimenting with the unique thrill in seeing the solution, will take control of the management of the putative responses from the community still active of people who try to break the code. Although the management of questions was an intensive work (Sanborn Fields from 30 to 40 letters per week), the artist thinks that it could soon be easier, ironically with the help of the AI. After my wired article last March, Sanborn claims to have been contacted by a well -known figure in the field of AI. (He will not say who.) This person has outlined as Sanborn could use the IA to respond to Kryptos fans, which is fun since much of the annoyance derives from the response to incorrect answers by people who use the IA. “Irony is not lost on me,” he says. Sanborn himself has no interest in working in tandem with the winning bidder to respond to the flow of aspiring resolutions, “I would prefer it to end,” he says. “At this point, I’m tired.”

But everything could happen. If a little billionaire wise Bitcoin Prahkter triggers the code, everything could very well explode. Remember when Martin Shkreli, who probably made a fortune by lifting the price of a medicine he controlled, was the high bidder for the single copy of a registration of the Wu-Tang clan? It was a flask! After Shkreli was sentenced for fraud in titles, the record was seized by the United States government and in the end it was sold to people who planned to carefully release the sections of the album as NFTS. But Shkreli had kept his copies and briefly started transmitting the transmitted. Experience showed how a poorly intentioned owner could violate the vision of an artist. However, Sanborn says that his sale comes without condition.