An interesting thing happened today.  I was playing the Da Vinci Code Quest for Eurostar when I reached a puzzle that was based on ciphers.  The puzzle itself wasn't that exciting, but look at the artwork they used in the background behind the puzzle:

Those seemingly cryptic symbols at the top of the image above should look familiar to you.  If they don't, consider the following image from zodiackiller.com of the infamous "340 Cipher":

The topmost visible line in the Eurostar page is approximately the tenth line down in the 340 cipher.

I found it interesting, if not a bit grisly, that the Eurostar folks are using a serial killer's cipher as an illustration for their contest.  Wonder what the Da Vinci Code folks would think if they knew?

With that little bit of amusement behind us, let me tell you what's been happening with my work on the 340 Cipher pictured above.

I had earlier on in the process built a list of the 62 symbols along with a statistical analysis that told me with a certain degree of error which of the symbols could represent which letters in the alphabet, and which letters those symbols most likely could NOT represent.  

Using that, I did a further analysis on the symbols and how they appear in the message.  Knowing that there are certain letters which tend to appear in "double" form in English text, I was able to narrow down some of the symbols by noting which ones appeared next to themselves in the cipher text.  Based on this, I believe I have determined with a reasonably high degree of confidence that a specific 3 symbols in the set represent the letters T, H, and E.  I've been trying to build from that to determine additional letters, words or phrases in the message.  While there are some "possible" words I've found in the message, like "THE", "TOGETHER", "EVENT", "OF THREE", "GET", and "OF FEAR".

I decided to modify my program to work slightly differently.  It now generates random keys, but locks down the symbols I believe I've identified to the values I believe they are.  Everything else in the key is randomized from the list of letters I believe that symbol could represent.  I'm hoping the program will find a word that fits in well with the letters I've already deduced values for and give me a hint as to the rest of the message key.  So far, I haven't gotten anything definite.