The encrypted message in the wall of a sports facility

The things that don’t exist: The windows of a building in the USA encode a message. The plaintext is not known yet.

Deutsche Version

The sports facilities at many US universities are extremely impressive. This is certainly due to the fact that there is fierce competition between such teaching institutions and therefore something has to be offered to the students. As a German, however, you shouldn’t be quite so envious, because the universities in the U.S. pay for such and other amenities – in the form of tuition fees, which often exceed $10,000 per semester. It goes without saying that the food in the dining halls and the rooms in the dormitories are not exactly offered at a bargain price.

The Lambright Cryptogram

Louisiana Tech University in Ruston (located between New Orleans and Dallas) has come up with something special for one of its sports facilities: The windows in one wall of the “Lambright Sports and Wellness Center” encode a message. You can read about it in a recent post on Reddit. I’ll refer to this cryptogram as the “Lambright Cryptogram.” Here is a photo of the building:

Quelle/Source: Imgur

And here is an image of the wall in question provided by blog reader YefimShifrin (YefimShifrin added the red lines):

Quelle/Source: YefimShifrin

The wall is probably about ten years old, yet no one seems to have bothered with the code until recently. The impetus probably came from university president Les Guice on Facebook. He referred to it as a “bulldog code.”

Naturally, I’ve included the Lambright cryptogram in the Cryptologic Travel Guide.

Solution already found?

The day before yesterday, Louisiana Tech University published an article saying a student had solved the Lambright cryptogram. Supposedly, she was inspired by an episode of the television series “Golden Girls.” However, the solution has not been published, and therefore guessing is still allowed.

As YefimShifrin’s graphic shows, the cryptogram consists of about 40 characters integrated into a five-line grid. There are some repetitions, but no duplications. Is this a simple letter substitution? A transcription would certainly be helpful.

However, I think a visual solution is more likely. An anamorphicon might be a possibility, but I have already tried that without success. Perhaps the individual elements compose themselves to letters, if one shifts them in the correct way.

The university wants to publish the solution when “the time is right”. Maybe a Cipherbrain reader is faster.

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Further reading: Die längste verschlüsselte Inschrift der Welt

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