Ian Bunn | Political & Popular Culture Arts

Software can help us crack historical ciphers (November 12th)

Kevin Knight a US computer scientist of the University of South Carolina Viterbi School of Engineering, along with an international team have cracked the Copiale Cipher. Knight and his Swedish colleagues Beáta Megyesi and Christiane Schaefer of Uppsala University decoded the secret encrypted 18th century document. The cracking of the 75,000 character cryptogram has revealed the rituals and politics of a German secret society. The document known as the Copiale Cipher, has had its secret meaning shrouded in mystery since discovery at the end of the Cold War, hidden at an East Berlin Academy. The document comprises 105 pages of handwritten messages in abstract symbols and Roman letters. Knight states “I’m happy that linguistic software can help us crack historical ciphers … Now I hope that decipherment techniques can help us build better translation software.”

Inspired by Mark Brown http://ow.ly/7dRWY image source atvn http://ow.ly/7dT7i

Lawrence “Larry” Page the 37 year old American computer scientist and software developer and co-founder of Google has been appointed the CEO of Google as the existing Eric Schmidt steps down to become executive chairman. Page developed Google along with Sergey Brin from a concept nicknamed ‘Backrub’ being the idea to quantify the number and nature of backlinks (ie citations) that a web page has developed, leading to a PageRank algorithm and the ultimate construction of a search engine far superior to those that existed. Eric Schmidt joined Google as Chairman and CEO as Brin and Page took on joint President roles, an unusual corporate structure but one that appeared to work well for the three. This new shuffle of deck chairs is being hailed as a means of speeding up decision making at the company.

Inspired by David Goldman ow.ly/3IVgW image source Wikipedia ow.ly/3IVqs