Old Secret Society Code Cracked

It sounds like a plot line from a fictional page turner. Locked inside a coded message is the politics and rituals of a secret society. The message is 105 pages long and contains a combination of Greek, Latin and abstract symbols.

This is not the latest novel from Dan Brown. This is a real document that has stymied code crackers since the document was unearthed in East Germany after the Cold War ended. Even that part sounds contrived.

But USC computer scientist Kevin Knight and two colleagues from Sweden (I can’t make this stuff up, really) applied some complex computer algorithms to solve the 250-year-old mystery. He, Beáta Megyesi and Christiane Schaefer transcribed the yellowing tome into a machine-readable version and then began work cracking the centuries-old code.

Facing Pages from the Copiale Cipher, A 105-page Book by a Secret Society

Even though Knight is no cryptographer he was able to crack the 75,000-character Copiale Cipher (PDF) by applying a statistical translation technique he uses to better translate languages.

The hardest code for computers to crack is definitely human speech. Companies are striving to figure out how to translate casual conversation into computer code which will allow us to talk to our smart devices without having to type, push a button or even touch the screen.

And they work toward this goal by applying their complicated math formulas to less tricky puzzles. Knight approaches language translation as a cryptographic problem, which he hopes can be used not only to improve human language translation but it could also be useful in translating languages that are not currently spoken by humans, including ancient languages and even animal communication.

To crack the Copiale Cipher, the team ran the whole thing through 80 languages and came up empty. Then they started isolating categories, thinking that perhaps they were the true code.

After a lot of automated trial and error they soon realized that the Roman symbols and Greek letters were part of a ruse placed deliberately to mislead the reader.

When they focused on the abstract symbols they recognized groupings and patterns. Then they began putting this new alphabet together. When they ran the whole cryptogram through a German language translator, words began to emerge. Then it all began to make sense.

Except that the document showed that this secret society had an unhealthy fixation on eyes. The members apparently participated in eye surgery, rituals involving eyeballs, plucking eyebrows and even ophthalmology.

Knight is now targeting other coded messages, including ciphers sent by the Zodiac Killer, a serial murderer who sent taunting letters to the the media and has never been caught. Knight is also applying his computer-assisted codebreaking 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 CIA headquarters, and the Voynich Manuscript, a medieval document that has baffled professional cryptographers for decades.