Via Instapundit and Wired:
For more than 260 years, the contents of that page—and the details of this ritual—remained a secret. They were hidden in a coded manuscript, one of thousands produced by secret societies in the 18th and 19th centuries. At the peak of their power, these clandestine organizations, most notably the Freemasons, had hundreds of thousands of adherents, from colonial New York to imperial St. Petersburg. Dismissed today as fodder for conspiracy theorists and History Channel specials, they once served an important purpose: Their lodges were safe houses where freethinkers could explore everything from the laws of physics to the rights of man to the nature of God, all hidden from the oppressive, authoritarian eyes of church and state. But largely because they were so secretive, little is known about most of these organizations. Membership in all but the biggest died out over a century ago, and many of their encrypted texts have remained uncracked, dismissed by historians as impenetrable novelties.
They Cracked This 250-Year-Old Code, and Found a Secret Society Inside | Danger Room | Wired.com
Points:
- Breaking the cipher:
- Complex cipher. Initial attempt was to record frequency of the symbols to correlate them to letters.
- Turned to algorithms from computational linguistics normally used for translation. Similar to breaking ciphers: discover rules of the language and apply them.
- Work backwards by tracking the known rules of English to reduce the number of possible combinations of letters.
- Use multiple passes of an expectation-maximization algorithm to determine how the cipher corresponds to English or other language words.
- Convert symbols into something machine readable.
- The algorithm is time consuming: 5 hours per language compared.
- Determined multiple symbols were used to represent single letters.
- Secret societies:
- “Hundreds of thousands of Europeans belonged to secret societies in the 18th century.”
- “Though they were clandestine, they were often remarkably inclusive.”
- “These societies were the incubators of democracy, modern science, and ecumenical religion.”
Ponder: How many more secrets can be made accessible through the algorithms that power modern computing?
