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

I suspect there's a second code hidden in there. From the article, describing the code symbols that are Roman letters:<p><pre><code> 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. </code></pre> It's implausible that these characters just happen to appear with a language-like frequency distribution and are all meaningless spaces. I suspect they actually have a meaning and provide a second message.<p>To clarify, it's like taking "SthisEisCtheRfirstEmessageT" and assuming all the capitals just indicate spaces.

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. 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?<p>* to put it in a less-polite way: how the <i>F</i> else would you solve a problem like this, with non-computational methods?

The next time I'm at the eye doctor, I'm going to be wondering what that eye chart <i>really</i> means. :-)<p>Another poster mentioned the Voynich manuscript. It's available on archive.org if anyone wants to try their hand:<p><a href="http://archive.org/details/TheVoynichManuscript" rel="nofollow">http://archive.org/details/TheVoynichManuscript</a><p>Here's a list of others:<p><a href="http://www.omniglot.com/writing/undeciphered.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.omniglot.com/writing/undeciphered.htm</a>

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.

Good catch, nice read, with a computational angle.<p>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.<p>Coffee houses, close groups having meetings, private rooms upstairs in narrow houses. The feeling that <i>true knowledge</i> was being passed on. The <i>meaning</i> people found in the processes of the primitive technology.<p>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, <i>and</i> the refinement of algorithms as they are applied to a larger corpus of texts.

&#62; 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.<p>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.

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.<p>...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"...<p>(... now putting my tinfoil hat back in the closet :) )

Actually, they cracked a 250 year old code and found a secret society inside a secret society. (True. Read the article!)

And now if only someone cracked the Voynich manuscript!

I'll be calling my rock band "Quiet Bulldozer". ;-)

This introduction feels eerily similar to an opening interview at Google.

Enjoyed reading this. Thank you.

Question (maybe a dumb one) but how does an algorithm account for symbols that might mean a series of letters? Or a symbol that stands for a different letter depending on the symbol before or after it?

Woah. Awesome story but was kinda disappointed with the ending, just leads to more riddles &#38; codes.

This was a fun read. Thanks for sharing.