There are news stories based upon a presentation made by some linguists and computer scientists at the Association for Computational Linguistics that may be of interest to some Tipsters. The presentation is on how a document called the "Copiale Cipher" that was written in code back in the 18th century in Germany was deciphered. It appears that most of the code has been cracked though some parts still remain unknown. The process and reasoning for cracking the code is interesting.
For one mass media account of the research, consider the UK Guardian's presentation which contains links to various documents. Here is the Guardian article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/punctuated-equilibrium/2011/oct/26/1?newsfeed=true Here is a PDF of the conference presentation (it describes the research and give examples of the coded text and decode text): http://aclweb.org/anthology-new/W/W11/W11-1202.pdf Here is a PDF of the entire "Copiale Cipher": http://stp.lingfil.uu.se/~bea/copiale/copiale150.pdf A complete translation of the "Copiale Cipher: is available here: http://stp.lingfil.uu.se/~bea/copiale/copiale-translation.pdf This is an example that is relevant to discussions of human reasoning, cryptography, computational linguistics (e.g., why do letter and digram frequencies matter), and other manuscripts or "texts" that have resisted decoding (e.g., the "Voynich Manuscript" and the final statement in the "Kryptos" sculpture in the backyard of the CIA; for more info see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kryptos (yadda-yadda) http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/us/21code.html -Mike Palij New York University [email protected] --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=13679 or send a blank email to leave-13679-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
