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The Copiale Cipher decoded

PostPosted: Wed Oct 26, 2011 1:04 pm
by brainpanhandler
Modern Algorithms Crack 18th Century Secret Code

By Mark Brown, Wired UK

Computer scientists from Sweden and the United States have applied modern-day, statistical translation techniques — the sort of which that are used in Google Translate — to decode a 250-year old secret message.

The original document, nicknamed the Copiale Cipher, was written in the late 18th century and found in the East Berlin Academy after the Cold War. It’s since been kept in a private collection, and the 105-page, slightly yellowed tome has withheld its secrets ever since.

But this year, University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering computer scientist Kevin Knight — an expert in translation, not so much in cryptography — and colleagues Beáta Megyesi and Christiane Schaefer of Uppsala University in Sweden, tracked down the document, transcribed a machine-readable version and set to work cracking the centuries-old code.

...

The document revealed the rituals and political leanings of a German secret society, and one that had a strange obsession with eyeballs, plucking eyebrows, eye surgery and ophthalmology.

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http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/ ... her-crack/





Link to pdf of English translation:
http://stp.lingfil.uu.se/~bea/copiale/c ... lation.pdf