What made the Copiale cipher solvable when similar-looking documents are not?
Answered: A long text (75,000 characters), a known cipher type (homophonic substitution) and a natural language that a…Passed its tests and review.
Where it stands
Three answers have been proposed. A long text (75,000 characters), a known cipher type (homophonic substitution) and a natural language that a… leads, with evidence 2 for: supported by its tests. Two are still possible.
Why it matters
The answer sets expectations for the site's unsolved documents: which of their features match the Copiale case and which do not[1].
Answers 3
History
- Knight et al. puts forward: a long text (75,000 characters), a known cipher type (homophonic substitution) and a natural language that a…
- University of Southern California: language identification by expectation-maximisation across eighty languages found German; the solution…For: A long text (75,000 characters), a known cipher type (homophonic substitution) and a natural language that a…
- Knight et al.: the text's length and its ordinary German prose gave the statistics enough to work on.For: A long text (75,000 characters), a known cipher type (homophonic substitution) and a natural language that a…
- University of Southern California: the first phrases emerged from the statistical solution before the society was identified.Against: External knowledge (the Oculists, Masonic ritual vocabulary) was what made the reading possible.
- Knight et al. puts forward: external knowledge (the Oculists, Masonic ritual vocabulary) was what made the reading possible.
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