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

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

#21

Post by Groxx »

cbr wrote: post #20
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.

Probably not. People are bad at random: http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2007/02/05/is-17-the-...

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

#22

Post by jlgreco »

cbr wrote: post #20
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.

Probably depends on how you were picking them. If you were using something like DiceWare to pick letters from an English document, then yeah, you would nail the frequency. But if you were picking letters at random in your head, I would be very surprised if you got anything more than a very roughest of distributions. Anything more than "lots of e's, few q's" would surprise me.

Humans rather suck at picking random numbers. We skew towards picking numbers that seem "more random", whatever that means (which would probably work in your favour for picking random letters with an English frequency, though I'm not too sure), but we also avoid "randomly" generating streaks of numbers, because we feel those are "less random".

If you put two teams in a room, one flipping a fair coin (and writing down the results), and the other pretending to flip a coin but just faking the results, it is usually very trivial to pick out which team actually flipped the coin. They are going to have surprisingly long streaks of heads or tails.

I don't have any evidence to necessarily suggest it, but I suspect this anti-streak tendency will tend to be strong enough to interfere with any correct frequencies which may otherwise appear. ("Oh my, this is far too many e's in a row..")

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

#23

Post by wlievens »

Groxx wrote: post #21
cbr wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Probably not. People are bad at random: http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2007/02/05/is-17-the-...

I think his point is valid exactly because people are bad at randomness.

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

#24

Post by fsiefken »

Jun8 wrote: post #12

And now if only someone cracked the Voynich manuscript!

yes, unfortunately the frequency and language analysis didn't result in anything useful except for some vague hints the encoded language might be asian, perhaps written by a westerner who traveled there.

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

#25

Post by Turing_Machine »

The next time I'm at the eye doctor, I'm going to be wondering what that eye chart really means. :-)

Another poster mentioned the Voynich manuscript. It's available on archive.org if anyone wants to try their hand:

http://archive.org/details/TheVoynichManuscript

Here's a list of others:

http://www.omniglot.com/writing/undeciphered.htm

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

#27

Post by mathattack »

Leszek wrote: post #15

> 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.

Actually it validates their intellectual experiment. That this is the way to correct answers.

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

#29

Post by dyselon »

Avshalom wrote: post #6
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…

>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…

Like a lot of people that played Fez, I recently did some frequency analysis by hand, to crack the alphabet in that game. It was pretty tedious, and I messed up frequently. I wouldn't blame her for giving up after a few mistakes.
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