![]() ![]() The manuscript threw up another challenge. A homophonic cipher uses multiple symbols to represent the more common letters, so you cannot work out the common letters by analysing symbol frequencies. This led the researchers down a different path, into homophonic ciphers. The manuscript had more than ninety symbols, and none of them were disproportionately common. This approach did not work for the Copiale cipher. In English, “e” is the most common letter – so you find the most common symbol and substitute an “e.” You look for doubled symbols (they’re often “oo,” “tt,” or “ss”) and common words (“the” or “a”), and pretty soon the cipher is solved. If you know the original language you can break a substitution cipher by looking at letter frequencies. The text is written in a normal language, but each letter is swapped for a different one. They began with the idea that it may be a substitution cipher. In 2011, a team of Californian and Swedish researchers deciphered the manuscript. Only two of the words were not encrypted: “Copiales 3” and “Philipp 1866.” The rest of the writing was impenetrable. ![]() The manuscript was full of dense code, incorporating normal letters, punctuation, accent marks, Greek letters, and other symbols. ![]() It was a hundred and five pages long and at least two hundred years old. The Copiale cipher is a great demonstration of that dance.Īcademics found the Copiale cipher in an East German research library in the 1970s. Good codes understand decoding techniques and purposefully work against them good code breaking recognises and adapts to those disguises. Cryptography is such a fascinating battle of minds between the encrypter and the decrypter. 18th century, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |