Codebreakers hope to use AI to uncover hard secrets of history

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Codebreakers hope to use AI to uncover hard secrets of history

History is full of encrypted mysteries, many of which cannot be solved by deciphering. (representative)

Over 400 years ago, Mary, Queen of Scots, was imprisoned in a castle in England on charges of conspiring against her cousin Elizabeth I. Trying to save her head, Mary wrote dozens of secret letters to her friends and allies. In some of them she discussed with the French ambassador how her rivals had kidnapped her son. In other articles, she complained about the conditions of the POWs and said she supported a controversial marriage that would help the French-British political alliance.

Mary folded the letter using a “spiral lock” technique so the recipient could tell if someone had opened the letter before receiving it. She and her colleagues also communicated with a complex cipher that protected the contents for her 436 years. And in February, a paper detailing how a group of codebreakers designed a computer system to crack the code. In this paper, we showed how Mary used a type of cipher known as complex homophonic cipher, which replaces individual letters of the alphabet with various symbols.

The researchers, who are part of a group of computer-savvy historians who call themselves the Decrypt Project, have been poring over manuscripts from European archives for the past decade, trying to uncover hidden messages. Part of the inspiration for this idea comes from his 2011 cracking of the Copiare cipher, a collection of his 105-page handwriting written by a German occultist in the 1700s. Depicted in the deciphered manuscript was a secret society initiation ritual that repeatedly asked new recruits to read a blank sheet of paper before pulling out an eyebrow.

The Decrypt project uses a combination of image analysis, computer algorithms designed to identify patterns, and the researchers’ own expertise in centuries-old languages ​​to turn forgotten text into a readable format. translate to As technology advances, the people behind the project and other historians doing similar research hope artificial intelligence will help unlock the secrets of an increasingly widespread, centuries-old document. are doing.

The long-term goal of the Decrypt project is to design something like a timeless Google Translate. It’s a tool that can scan historical documents and translate them into modern English, regardless of the era, the language in which the document was written, or the encryption used. The prospects for building such tools remain uncertain, but historians are beginning to feel confident in their cryptanalytic abilities. “For historical documents, there is not much uniform data, because people write differently in different writing systems and in different handwriting,” says the decoding project leader and computational linguistics professor at Uppsala University in Sweden. says Beata Mejesi, a professor at “We have developed an AI model to transcribe these systems, which allows us to do our work more efficiently.”

History is full of encrypted mysteries, many of which cannot be solved by deciphering alone. One study explores how the sophistication of encryption used by the Roman Catholic Church in communicating with world leaders declined between the 16th and 18th centuries. This regression is documented, but the reason behind it is unknown. According to one theory, there was a group within the Vatican that specialized in encrypted messages, but the technology could not be passed on to its successors.

In 2020, a group of mathematicians announced that they had cracked the code used by the Zodiac serial killer to communicate with police officers in 1969. Like many encrypted messages, the memo used complex permutation techniques, using one or more characters. Alphabet place. Zodiac Killer used multiple symbols for each letter and varied the symbols used to make the code harder to crack. Using custom-made software, mathematicians were able to decipher the code by cycling the symbols in a regular pattern within a single note, said Kevin Knight, a computer science professor at the University of Southern California. said to have discovered He was involved in deciphering the Copiare cipher and analyzing the correspondence of the zodiac signs.

A decrypted message seen by the FBI read, “I hope you’re having fun trying to catch me.” Other Zodiac letters remain encrypted, and the killer’s identity remains a mystery. But Knight said advances in code-breaking technology have given historians an edge in uncovering long-held secrets. “It has a lot of historical significance,” he says. “There has been an arms race since time immemorial between those who make and break codes.”



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