The Copiale Cipher. W11-1202. Copiale. Kevin Knight, Beáta Megyesi, Christiane Schaefer The Copiale Cipher is a 105 pages manuscript containing all in all around 75 000 characters. Beautifully bound in green and gold brocade paper, written on high quality paper with two different watermarks, the manuscript can be dated back to 1760-1780. Apart from what is obviously an owner's mark (“Philipp 1866”) and a note in the end of the last page (“Copiales 3”), the manuscript is completely encoded. The cipher employed consists of 90 different characters, comprising all from Roman and Greek letters, to diacritics and abstract symbols. Transcription, transliteration and decipherment brought to light a German text obviously related to an 18th century secret society, namely the "oculist order". Publications Knight, K., Megyesi, B. and Schaefer, C. 2011. Knight, K., Megyesi, B. and Schaefer, C. 2012.
In the press Download Contact information Acknowledgements. Computer scientist cracks mysterious 'Copiale Cipher' Public release date: 25-Oct-2011 [ Print | E-mail Share ] [ Close Window ] Contact: Suzanne Wusuzanne.wu@usc.edu 213-740-0252University of Southern California The manuscript seems straight out of fiction: a strange handwritten message in abstract symbols and Roman letters meticulously covering 105 yellowing pages, hidden in the depths of an academic archive.
Now, more than three centuries after it was devised, the 75,000-character "Copiale Cipher" has finally been broken. The mysterious cryptogram, bound in gold and green brocade paper, reveals the rituals and political leanings of a 18th-century secret society in Germany. The rituals detailed in the document indicate the secret society had a fascination with eye surgery and ophthalmology, though it seems members of the secret society were not themselves eye doctors.
"When you get a new code and look at it, the possibilities are nearly infinite," Knight said. "It took quite a long time and resulted in complete failure," Knight says. Translation algorithms used to crack centuries-old secret code. Translation algorithms used to crack centuries-old secret code. Computer scientists from Sweden and the United States have applied modern-day, statistical translation techniques—the sort that are used in Google Translate—to decode a 250-year old secret message. The original document, nicknamed the Copiale Cipher, was written in the late 18th century and found in the East Berlin Academy after the Cold War. It's since been kept in a private collection, and the 105-page, slightly yellowed tome has withheld its secrets ever since. But this year, University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering computer scientist Kevin Knight—an expert in translation, not so much in cryptography—and colleagues Beáta Megyesi and Christiane Schaefer of Uppsala University in Sweden, tracked down the document, transcribed a machine-readable version and set to work cracking the centuries-old code.
The book's pages—bound in gold and green brocade paper—contained about 75,000 characters in very neat handwriting.