They Cracked This 250 Year-Old Code, And Found a Secret Society Inside
1–10 of 39 posts
Re: They Cracked This 250 Year-Old Code, And Found a Secret Society Inside
#2I'll be calling my rock band "Quiet Bulldozer". ;-)
Re: They Cracked This 250 Year-Old Code, And Found a Secret Society Inside
#3A wonderful read. I know a little bit about frequency analysis and was surprised to see how straightforward its application was (in theory). I'm even more surprised that after a decade of Google, that this approach wouldn't be one of the first things tried out given the length of the text. As the OP describes, it was a chance encounter at a conference that machine learning was finally introduced into the problem. Until that point, the linguist had been trying in vain to decipher the text...is there still such a gap between the researchers and the computational experts who know how to implement solutions?
* to put it in a less-polite way: how the F else would you solve a problem like this, with non-computational methods?
Re: They Cracked This 250 Year-Old Code, And Found a Secret Society Inside
#4A wonderful read. I know a little bit about frequency analysis and was surprised to see how straightforward its application was (in theory). I'm even more surprised that after a decade of Google, that this approach wouldn't be one of the first things tried out given the length of the text. As the OP describes, it was a chance encounter at a conference that machine learning was finally introduced into the problem. Unt…
I suppose so. The article said Schaefer didn't have an internet connection. But how else? This is hard to say. How many people really worked in this one? The article doesn't say, but it does seem to suggest that not many people seen or heard of the Oculists or this piece of writing. I would think many other ciphers have been cracked in the pre-computer era that are of equal or similar difficulty of this one, but the difference is how many eyes were on it.
This is an excellent article. When wired writes a good article, it is always amazing.
Re: They Cracked This 250 Year-Old Code, And Found a Secret Society Inside
#5Good catch, nice read, with a computational angle.
Take a walk down some of the older lanes in London, say near Borough Market or back up towards Southwark, or the other side between Brick Lane and Petticoat Lane, and imagine yourself back in the 1700s.
Coffee houses, close groups having meetings, private rooms upstairs in narrow houses. The feeling that true knowledge was being passed on. The meaning people found in the processes of the primitive technology.
It strikes me that the boring bits of the decoding (tokenising the symbols, entering the tokens) could be farmed out using a web site hosting scans of texts. The computational resource could perhaps be spare cycles on a PC with an appropriate application. Scope for lay science of a particularly interesting kind, and the refinement of algorithms as they are applied to a larger corpus of texts.
Re: They Cracked This 250 Year-Old Code, And Found a Secret Society Inside
#6A wonderful read. I know a little bit about frequency analysis and was surprised to see how straightforward its application was (in theory). I'm even more surprised that after a decade of Google, that this approach wouldn't be one of the first things tried out given the length of the text. As the OP describes, it was a chance encounter at a conference that machine learning was finally introduced into the problem. Unt…
>Until that point, the linguist had been trying in vain to decipher the text
Well no, the linguist tried in vain to do frequency analysis by hand on ~88 symbols for ~100 pages for a couple months before saying "bugger this for a game of soldiers" and went on with her life.
"She tried a few times to catalog the symbols, in hopes of figuring out how often each one appeared. This kind of frequency analysis is one of the most basic techniques for deciphering a coded alphabet. But after 40 or 50 symbols, she’d lose track. After a few months, Schaefer put the cipher on a shelf."
Re: They Cracked This 250 Year-Old Code, And Found a Secret Society Inside
#7Enjoyed reading this. Thank you.
Re: They Cracked This 250 Year-Old Code, And Found a Secret Society Inside
#8This introduction feels eerily similar to an opening interview at Google.
Re: They Cracked This 250 Year-Old Code, And Found a Secret Society Inside
#9I suspect there's a second code hidden in there. From the article, describing the code symbols that are Roman letters:
These unaccented Roman letters appeared with the frequency
you’d expect in a European language. But they don’t
represent letters—they mark the spaces between words.
To clarify, it's like taking "SthisEisCtheRfirstEmessageT" and assuming all the capitals just indicate spaces.
Re: They Cracked This 250 Year-Old Code, And Found a Secret Society Inside
#10I suspect there's a second code hidden in there. From the article, describing the code symbols that are Roman letters: These unaccented Roman letters appeared with the frequency you’d expect in a European language. But they don’t represent letters—they mark the spaces between words. It's implausible that these characters just happen to appear with a language-like frequency distribution and are all meaningless spaces.…
Unless they simply took random letters from some other text to get their spaces, in which case you'd get the correct frequency, in a sufficiently large text, with no meaning.