We can safely say that there are few people in this world who have any knowledge of what the Copiale Cipher means, or even what it is. An old, yellowing manuscript with unfamiliar symbols and letters, it looks like it could be a movie prop from the Raiders of the Lost Ark series.
The Copiale Cipher is actually a 105-page document from an 18th century secret society in Germany, which reveals the rituals of its members, who according to the code, were fascinated with eye surgery and ophthalmology.
We know that now because Kevin Knight, a computer scientist at the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute and Beáta Megyesi and Christiane Schaefer, two researchers from Uppsala University, cracked the cipher.
It took months of diligent work before the research team was able to focus on one familar word: ceremonie – a variation of the German word for ceremony, as the LA Times explains here.
Knight told the LA Times, they were able to figure out the rest.
"You start to see patterns, then you reach the magic point where a word appears," Knight said in the article. “You no longer even care what the document's about."
The centuries-old manuscript had been located in East Berlin after the end of the Cold War. Knight began working with Megyesi and Schaefer of Uppsala University in Sweden in January and finished in April, according to the article.
"For me, the fun is in cracking the code," he told the LA Times. "It has passed through a lot of hands, but you persevered and could read what other people couldn't."
Follow USA LOCAL NEWS for the latest LA news, events and entertainment: Twitter: @USA LOCAL NEWS // Facebook: USA LOCAL NEWS
No comments:
Post a Comment