What’s in the Copiale Cipher?
Until recently, no one knew. It’s an 18th century document written by a German secret society, and it contains a mixture of ordinary letters and strange symbols. Now, computational linguists have used modern techniques to crack this mysterious code.
Linguist Daniel Midgley reveals how they did it in this episode of Talk the Talk.
Listen to this episode
You can listen to all the episodes of Talk the Talk by pasting this URL into your podlistener.
http://danielmidgley.com/talkthetalk/talk_classic.xmlIf you like secret codes and ciphers, this one’s for you. The Copiale Cipher was cracked recently, and it’s an initiation ritual for a bunch of 18th century wannabe ophthalmologists. Intriguing, ¿no?
Have a listen, and claim your free decoder ring.
Show notes
Decoder rings are fun.
http://www.exploratorium.edu/ronh/secret/secret.html
This kind of simple substitution cipher is also known as the Caesar Cipher.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesar_cipher
Enigma machines pushed computational cryptography to the limit
http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/content/machines.rhtm
but Alan Turing and co. were equal to the task.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptanalysis_of_the_Enigma
Turing was repaid shamefully for his work in cryptanalysis and computation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing
The Copiale Cipher has been cracked
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/punctuated-equilibrium/2011/oct/26/1
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/oct/26/local/la-me-usc-code-breaker-20111026
The team explains how they did it (PDF)
http://www.isi.edu/natural-language/people/copiale-11.pdf
and here’s what it said. (PDF)
http://stp.lingfil.uu.se/~bea/copiale/copiale-translation.pdf
