Mysterious 500-year-old Voynich manuscript “has secret message”
A 15th-century manuscript described as “the world’s most mysterious” contains a secret message, according to a new computer analysis.
By
Rob Waugh |
Yahoo!
News – Mon, Jun 24,
2013
Yahoo! News - A 15th-century manuscript described as “the world’s
most mysterious” definitely does contain a secret message, according
to a new computer
analysis.
A 15th-century manuscript described as “the world’s most
mysterious” contains a secret message, according to a new computer
analysis.
The Voynich Manuscript is written in an unknown language and script - and
the 240-page vellum book has defied dozens of attempts to decipher it, even
by top World War II codebreakers.
Carbon dating suggests that it was written in the second half of the fifteenth
century, but the book first "surfaced" in the seventeenth century. It appears
to be a guide to plants, but almost all the illustrations show non-existent
species.
The manuscript is highly controversial, with many experts dismissing it as
a hoax - but a new analysis of the text appears to have found
“patterns” of meaning which would have been impossible to fake
in the 15th century.
The new research has also found "keywords", some of which seem to match to
the strange, hand-drawn illustrations that surround the text. It could aid
new attempts to crack the code.
[Related:
Researchers crack Copiale cipher]
“The Voynich text has resisted all attempts to decipher it, even by
top World War II cryptographers,” says Dr. Marcelo A. Montemurro of
Manchester University. “However, the fact that it has been impossible
to decode so far cannot be a proof that there is no message inside
it.”
Other ciphers previously thought "unbreakable" have recently been cracked
by computer technology - such as the Copiale Cipher, an 18th century German
manuscript which was "broken" in 2011, revealing the secret rites of an occult
society.
“For the past few years I have been studying the statistics of language
- using methods from physics and information theory,” says Montemurro.
“These methods allow the extraction of keywords (that is words that
are closely relevant to the meaning of the text) even if the underlying language
is unknown.”
Montemurro’s technique analysed the text at a large scale - looking
for “clusters” of words as the text moved from one subject to another,
rather than trying to understand the manuscript’s grammar.
“Over long spans of texts, words leave a statistical signature about
their use,” says Montemurro. “When the topic shifts to a different
one, other words are needed, and so on.”
Montemurro’s analysis found a range of “keywords” in the text
- and found that the pattern of their use was similar to known languages.
The researchers also found that clusters of keywords seemed to
“match” the illustrations.
The knowledge required to put this level of detail into a hoax manuscript
means it is less likely that a 15th century hoaxer could have faked it.
“It is not not an absolute impossibility that it is a hoax - but most
if not all of these features were not known in the 15th century,” says
Montemurro. “The hoax hypothesis is that it needs to explain all the
levels of structure that are found in the text - and how they could naturally
emerge from the hoaxing method.”
“I’m not a cryptographer, but I can see it as a step forward in the sense that now there are candidates among the text’s words to be those more closely connected with the meaning of the text,” says Montemurro. “There is still the question of what sort of method was used to encode the message and hide its message - making a connection between our analysis and a possible decoding mechanism will require more specialized research."
· Article: Code of Mysterious Secret Society Cracked Centuries Later
LiveScience.com - Wed, Oct 26, 2011
· Article: US, Swedish researchers crack 250-year-old cipher
Associated Press - Wed, Oct 26, 2011
Code of Mysterious Secret Society Cracked Centuries Later
By
Charles Choi |
LiveScience.com – Wed,
Oct 26, 2011
A mysterious encrypted manuscript of a secret society, meticulously written in abstract symbols and Roman letters, has finally been deciphered more than three centuries after it was first handwritten, scientists now reveal.
The enciphered message, or cryptogram, revealed the rituals and political aims of an enigmatic 18th-century German fellowship, the "Oculist Order," revealing the society had a fascination with eye surgery, though it seems members of the society were not eye doctors.
"This opens up a window for people who study the history of ideas and the history of secret societies," said researcher Kevin Knight, a computer scientist at the University of Southern California. "Historians believe that secret societies have had a role in revolutions, but all that is yet to be worked out, and a big part of the reason, is because so many documents are enciphered."
Cracking a cryptogram
The mysterious cryptogram, bound in gold-and-green brocade paper, dates back to a time between 1760 and 1780. Once hidden in the depths of the East Berlin Academy and uncovered after the Cold War, its 75,000 characters are written in 90 different cipher letters, including the 26 Roman letters as well as many abstract symbols. [Read: History's Most Overlooked Mysteries]
On its 105 yellowing pages, the only plain text is "Philipp 1866" on the flyleaf and "Copiales 3" at the end of the last page. "Philipp" is thought to have been an owner of the manuscript, while "Copiales" was used to give the secret writing its name: the Copiale Cipher.
To break the cipher, an international team of researchers tracked down the manuscript, now in a private collection, and transcribed a machine-readable version of the text.
The investigators began not even knowing the language of the encrypted document. At first they focused on the Roman and Greek characters sprinkled throughout the Copiale Cipher, isolating them from the abstract symbols and attacked it as the real text.
"It took quite a long time and resulted in complete failure," Knight said.
Secret symbols
After trying 80 languages, the cryptography team realized the Roman characters were "nulls" intended to mislead readers, somewhat like how pig Latin adds the suffix "ay" to words in an attempt to confuse listeners. It was the abstract symbols that held the message.
"It was exciting to decode," Knight recalled.
One idea that eventually bore fruit was that abstract symbols with similar shapes in the Copiale Cipher represented the same letter or groups of letters — for instance, the symbols with the circumflex "^" over them were actually the letter "E." The researchers also detected an extraordinarily common three-symbol cluster, which they deduced represented the letters "cht," a common trio in German. Eventually from these lines of attack, the first meaningful words of German emerged: "Ceremonies of Initiation," followed by "Secret Section," as translated.
"When you get a new code and look at it, the possibilities are nearly infinite," Knight said. "Once you come up with a hypothesis based on your intuition as a human, you can turn over a lot of grunt work to the computer."
These findings "may help trace the development of political ideas and the advancement of ranks within secret societies," Knight told LiveScience. As to why this secret society might have focused on the eye, "the eye is part of the symbology of secret societies," he explained.
More unsolved encryptions
Knight is now targeting other encrypted messages, including ciphers sent by the Zodiac Killer, a serial murderer who sent taunting messages to the press and has never been caught. He is also applying his computer-assisted decryption software to other famous unsolved codes such as the last section of "Kryptos," an encrypted message carved into a granite sculpture on the grounds of the CIA headquarters, and the Voynich Manuscript, a medieval document that has baffled professional cryptographers for decades.
However, the trickiest puzzle of all for Knight may be everyday speech. He is one of the world's leading experts on machine translation, teaching computers to turn Chinese into English, or Arabic into Korean.
"Translation remains a tough challenge for artificial intelligence," said Knight, whose translation software has been adopted by Apple and Intel, among other companies.
Knight is approaching translation as a cryptographic problem. As such, research into cracking the ciphers of obscure secret societies could improve human language translation, and possibly lead to the ability to translate languages not currently spoken by humans, including ancient languages and animal communication. [Read: Dead Languages Reveal a Lost World]
"We are exploring how to make use of cryptographic techniques to make better language translation software," Knight said.
The scientists detailed their work in June at a meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics in Portland Ore.
Follow LiveScience for the latest in science news and discoveries on Twitter @livescience and on Facebook.
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US, Swedish researchers crack 250-year-old cipher
AP – Wed, Oct 26, 2011
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Scientists in California and Sweden said they have used computer translation techniques to solve a 250-year-old mystery by deciphering a coded manuscript written for a secret society.
The University of Southern California announced Tuesday that researchers had broken the Copiale Cipher, a 105-page, 18th century document from Germany.
The handwritten, beautifully bound book didn't contain any sort of Da Vinci Code but rather a snapshot of the arcane rituals practiced by one of the many secret societies that flourished in the 1700s.
It also recorded rites for some apparent sects of Freemasonry that showed political leanings.
"This opens up a window for people who study the history of ideas and the history of secret societies," USC computer scientist Kevin Knight, who was on the deciphering team, said in a statement. "Historians believe that secret societies have had a role in revolutions, but all that is yet to be worked out, and a big part of the reason is because so many documents are enciphered."
The handwritten Copiale Cipher was discovered in East Berlin after the Cold War and is now in a private collection. Most of the book was written in a cipher of 90 characters that included abstract symbols and Roman and Greek letters.
Knight and Beata Megyesi and Christiane Schaefer of Sweden's Uppsala University went to work cracking it earlier this year. They used a computer program to automate a key code-breaking procedure — tallying the frequency and grouping of the letters and symbols — then automated the process of comparing the cipher to known languages.
It's a method used by many automated translation programs.
The researchers tried the Roman letters first, comparing them to some 80 languages.
"It took quite a long time and resulted in complete failure," Knight said.
Eventually, they determined that the abstract symbols, not the unaccented Roman letters, bore the message. The first words deciphered were German for "ceremonies of initiation" and "secret section."
The initiation rites were for an "ocular society" that used a lot of eye-based symbolism.
For example, a candidate was supposed to look at a blank piece of paper and be asked if he can see writing. If he answers no, he is given eyeglasses, tries again, and then his eyes are washed with a cloth.
"If nothing helps, he (the master of ceremonies) will announce that they have to proceed with the operation," which consists of plucking a hair from the candidate's eyebrow, according to the text.
Knight is working on cracking other ciphers, including one that San Francisco's Zodiac Killer used in messages to police during his spree; the last section of "Kryptos," a coded sculpture at CIA headquarters, and the Voynich Manuscript, a famous work from the 1400s.