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They Cracked This 250 Year-Old Code, And Found a Secret Society Inside

wired.com

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Re: They Cracked This 250 Year-Old Code, And Found a Secret Society Inside

#11

Post by ChuckMcM »

kens wrote: post #9

I 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.…

I wouldn't doubt it, since codes within codes was common. However its not clear that they are necessarily related. There where some secret codexes where the additional codes acted like a watermark to tell you whose copy of the notes it was so if they leaked out you could go deal with them.

As a kid I was always making up codes and ciphers. Much more of a spy vs spy kid than a cops and robbers kid.

Re: They Cracked This 250 Year-Old Code, And Found a Secret Society Inside

#13

Post by nnq »

this: "The unaccented Roman letters didn’t spell out the code. They were the spaces that separated the words of the real message, which was actually written in the glyphs and accented text." makes me think of a cyphertext within a cyphertext, something like an ancient form of stenography.

...maybe the symbold used as spaces are not actually random and there's another message hidden there, with another cypher, offering the writers of this "plausible deniability" regarding its existence: they could only give the way to decipher the first level of encryption and say that's all there is, while the really important information was hidden in the "space characters"...

(... now putting my tinfoil hat back in the closet :) )

Re: They Cracked This 250 Year-Old Code, And Found a Secret Society Inside

#15

Post by Leszek »

> Eventually we turned to the last items in the Oculist trove: nine copies of a four-page document written in a mixture of old German, Latin, and the Copiale’s coded script. The message was more or less identical in every set.

I feel kind of sorry for them, that at the end of their journey they found what was essentially a Rosetta Stone for the code they were decoding.

Re: They Cracked This 250 Year-Old Code, And Found a Secret Society Inside

#16

Post by _delirium »

danso wrote: post #3

A 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 don't think there's really such a gap in general. Classicists have been using computer-assisted frequency analysis for decades now to do things such as authorship attribution, and classics is otherwise a pretty staid and conservative field. I would guess this particular researcher just wasn't familiar with computational methods.

Re: They Cracked This 250 Year-Old Code, And Found a Secret Society Inside

#18

Post by xenonite »

kens wrote: post #9

I 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.…

The article suggests this as well. In the last paragraph, they say that a second coding using numbers could be treasured in the text.

Re: They Cracked This 250 Year-Old Code, And Found a Secret Society Inside

#19

Post by gebe »

Wow, not often accomplishments from people you actually know and have had as teachers end up on the frontpage of HN. I was at the same talk by Kevin Knight as Schaefer and I can vouch for that it was a mighty interesting one! I actually changed my curriculum a bit (to include cryptography) as a result of his talk.

Re: They Cracked This 250 Year-Old Code, And Found a Secret Society Inside

#20

Post by cbr »

kens wrote: post #9

I 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.…

    It's implausible that these characters just happen to
    appear with a language-like frequency distribution and
    are all meaningless spaces
Really? If I were to try to pick random letters I suspect I would end up mirroring the frequency that they appeared in English.
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