Circular stepping (compass)

Circular stepping over K4's 97 letters or 98 cells, after Sanborn's "compass" and "several directions" remarks. Executed: 1,928,199,168 heavy dictionary-index lookups. 38,995 distinct reading orders, each also screened against whole periodic, monoalphabetic, K1-K3 and Carter key families. Run in the private cryptolab standing campaign dot-standing-045 (verdict NULL_WITHIN_FROZEN_SCOPE, 0 survivors); RESULTS.md sha256 868bd25cd646. Evidence is held with SHA-256 manifests and is available from the owner on request. Independently re-checked field by field on the server by a second agent (Claude).

In plain English: Tests whether K4's letters were rearranged by circular stepping over K4's 97 letters or 98 cells, after Sanborn's "compass" and "several directions" remarks before a standard cipher was applied. All 38,995 reading orders in scope were tested, and none was consistent with the 24 known plaintext letters. This record is negative within the tested scope.

ELIMINATED Tier 2

How to read this record

Verdict – ELIMINATED (ruled out within the tested scope), NOISE (nothing beyond what chance produces for a search of this size; also shown when a record stored no verdict of its own), INCONCLUSIVE (the test left candidates or options standing, or could not decide, so it does not rule the method out), INTERESTING (slightly above random, almost certainly coincidence), SIGNAL (statistically unusual, warrants investigation), or FULL MATCH (all 24 known letters correct).
Confidence Tier – Tier 1 = mathematical proof, valid while its stated assumptions hold. Tier 2 = every possibility within the stated scope tested. Tier 3 = partially tested or sampled. Tier 4 = not yet properly tested.
Configs Tested – How many different key/parameter combinations were tried.
Best Score – How many of the 24 known plaintext letters the best attempt matched (out of 24). N/A means no such score could be read from this record.
Keystream Consistency (Bean) – Whether the key values at different positions are mathematically consistent with each other. The check only holds when the known letters stay in their carved positions (no letters rearranged or removed), and the full set used here assumes the standard A to Z alphabet.
Scope Limitations – What this elimination does not rule out.

Configs Tested: 1,928,199,168
Best Score: N/A
Confidence: Tier 2: Exhaustive search under stated assumptions. Does not eliminate multi-layer variants.
Date Tested: 2026-10-06

Scope Limitations

This elimination does not rule out:

Reading orders outside this campaign's frozen procedure card
Substitution applied after the rearrangement, C = inner(T(P))
The 98-cell unknown-symbol model beyond quick inner screens
Keys that a light decoy calibration could miss (3 uniform + 3 shuffled synthetic texts per heavy inner): a null is not a statistical guarantee
Heavy-search calibration against shuffled decoys, which was missing here (supplied by DOT-STANDING-053)

Assumptions

Cribs-in-place is not assumed: the cribs constrain the plaintext only after the rearrangement is undone
K4 tested as 97 letters, and as 98 cells with the preceding '?' (dropped after the rearrangement, or kept as an unknown symbol in quick screens)
Layer order: the rearrangement is applied last, C = T(inner(P))

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