Copiale cipher

The Codex Copiale (tentative name) is a manuscript from the 18th century in cipher, which was not known to the public in 2011. The deciphering of the text managed the American computational linguists Kevin Knight of the University of Southern California along with Beata Megyesi and Christiane Schaefer of Uppsala University in 2011. The text is written in German language in contemporary orthography approximately in the middle of the 18th century and contains the description of secret initiation rites of a German masonic -like society that calls itself " Oculisten ". Description and publication of the code system were made in 2011. A scientific treatment of the transcribed text is not yet available. Scans of the original pages, the machine-readable text, the determined German -language provisional plain text and a preliminary English translation are online (see links).

Description

For provenance and current owner of the tape missing details (in the work of Knight, Megyesi and Schaefer says the origin only " from the East Berlin Academy "). The volume should according to various press publications have been investigated without results from October 2011 already in the 1970s at the Academy of Sciences of the GDR in East Berlin, or have emerged after the end of the Cold War there or be in private ownership (see Press Reports section ). A web publication from November 2012 deals with the history of the decipherment and displays an image from another manuscript in the same cipher in the Lower Saxony State Archives State Archives Wolfenbüttel. The State Archives Wolfenbüttel secures additional documents and objects, from which can be tapped history and practices of Oculisten Order.

The Codex consists of 105 pages with a total of about 75,000 characters and is written on high quality paper and bound in an ornate cover made of green - gold brocade paper. The pages are paginated with Arabic numerals. Pictures or references to the content are missing. The text is written cleanly and clearly by a skilled writer with a few corrections. It is divided into sections, word delimiter missing, curators are inserted. The unknown font uses about 90 different characters, including the 26 Latin letters a to z, some with diacritics, plus more icons with partly common (colon, individual Greek letters ) and partially unknown forms. The only unencrypted notes of the band on the non- paginated flyleaf contains the endorsement " Philipp 1866 " in a manuscript of the 19th century, continued on page 105 below as a conclusion a fee note " Copiales 3 rth. " ( Transcripts 3 Reichsthaler ) and on page 68 down a similar crossed beyond recognition note, both in a manuscript of the 18th century. The note on the flyleaf is interpreted as ownership inscription, the Endnotiz served the decipherers the provisional designation of the code system as Copiale Cipher ( Copiale cipher ).

Decryption

A group of researchers at the American computational linguists Kevin Knight found out in 2011 that the text is encrypted homophonic. Each letter in the plaintext is replaced by one or more symbols in the ciphertext; frequently occurring letters received several symbols. More signs have been included as Blender to conceal that carry no information.

The first 16 pages of the Codex with 10,840 characters were transcribed into machine- readable text to decipher. Latin uppercase letters are only available at chapter beginnings and implemented by linguists in Latin lowercase. The statistical evaluation of the monogram frequencies ( single-character distribution ) of the remaining approximately 90 characters gave no indication of the underlying language. The frequency distribution of bigrams and trigrams pointed to German, as well as the name of Philip on the flyleaf ( German spelling) and the origin of the Codex ( Germany ). To identify the same syntactic character using the cosine similarity calculated linguists placement vectors for each character. Finally, the researchers found that all the Latin letters of the text are to be interpreted without diacritical points as a blank space or a word separator, the remaining characters can be replaced by letters. Therefore, the decryption proved so difficult, since some letters are enciphered by several symbols ( so are â, ê, î, ô and û the cipher all e ) is coded, a letter doubling with a colon and the frequently occurring in English bigrams st and ch and sh own the trigram symbols have been assigned, so that the frequency distribution of the letters does not match that of the natural German language. After eight eye-catching larger symbols were approximately interpreted as logograms that match whole words. For example, is a symbol that resembles an eye or a mouth ( represented as * lip * in the machine readable text ) for the name of the secret society. Only by comparison with known texts, such as the 18th century appeared in print public statutes of the masonic similar Oculisten Society in Wolfenbüttel, the icon (eye - opener) can be as eye and meant as a term " oculist " interpret. In Wolfenbüttel archives to find more fonts in the same cipher. Also, they have since been partially deciphered.

Content

The text deals extensively the ceremonies and rituals of the secret society in the 18th century. Up to a scientific treatment of the content is only available to the text itself; here the transcription of the first page:

: the   Act buchs   the hocherleuchte * lip * eN * o *   secret in part.   first section   secret teaching before the journeymen.   first titul.   ceremonies of reception.   when the safety of the * tri * .. THe older by th   besorget ürhüter and the * tri * from .. dirigirendeN * nee *   is opened by drafting his Huth is   the candidat of the younger porters from an   abgeholet nem another room and by the hand   and before the dirigirendeN * nee * shows up out   this asks him:   first place, if he desired to be * lip *   zweytens those Regulations * o * is un literature

• Law - book, the highly enlightened Oculisten - Gesellschafft. Containing Some general regulations, duties and purposes the same. Edited On Special command of the Great Lodge Of A loyal and love of honor brother and master. 28 S. no publisher, place of publication and without year ( 1745 ).
• Aloys Henning: Early lodge of the 18th century: " The Hocherleuchtete Oculisten Society " in Wolfenbüttel. In: Erich Thunders (ed.): Europe in the early modern period. Festschrift for Günter Mühlpfordt. Volume 5: Enlightenment in Europe. Böhlau, Weimar, inter alia, 1999, ISBN 3-412-17497-1, pp. 65-82.
• Kevin Knight, Beata Megyesi, Christiane Schaefer: The Copiale Cipher. Proceedings of the 4th workshop on building and using Comparable corpora. 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Comparable Linguistics, Portland, Oregon, 24 June 2011, pp. 2-9.

Press reports

• John Markoff: How Revolutionary Tools Cracked a 1700s Code ( Nytimes.com of 24 October 2011)
• Sven Stein: U.S. scientists crack secret German code ( Bild.de of 27 October 2011)
• Nina Weber: Researchers crack centuries-old secret code ( Spiegel.de of 27 October 2011)