Researchers Crack Secret Society's 18th Century Code, Target World's Most Mysterious Book

[quote]They're going to need a bigger secret decoder ring.

A team of researchers that made headlínes for decoding a secret society's 18th century manuscript is working to reveal the secret behind an even more mysterious book -- one that the world has yet to decode.

Found in a chest of books outside Rome by a dealer in antique books, the Voynich manuscript has remained one of history’s biggest mysteries: Its aging parchment is coated in alien characters and has for centuries mystified scientists. And Kevin Knight, a computer scientist with USC's Viterbi School of Engineering who recently helped crack the Copiale Cipher, believes the same techniques could be used to tackle literature’s great mystery manuscript.

“We have decipherment algorithms, but we also have tools that just look for patterns,” Knight told FoxNews.com in an interview. “Those pattern-finders helped us find similar sets of letters in Copiale, and they have already started helping us find patterns in the Voynich manuscript.”

The Copiale Cipher -- a mysterious cryptogram bound in gold and green brocade paper -- is a 250-year-old coded document. By decrypting it, Knight and his colleagues uncovered the inner workings of an 18th-century secret society.

The codebreaking team began without knowing the language of the encrypted document. They had a hunch about the Roman and Greek characters distributed throughout the manuscript, however, so they isolated these from the abstract symbols and attacked it as the true code.

After trying 80 languages, the team realized the characters were actually meant to throw them off, deliberately planted to misread readers. With the aid of statistics and algorithms such as expected word frequency, the first meaningful phrases began to emerge: “Ceremonies of Initiation,” followed by “Secret Section.”

Knight is now targeting other coded messages, including ciphers the Zodiac Killer sent to the police in the 60s and 70s, the C.I.A.’s “Kryptos” sculpture, as well as the infamous Voynich manuscript

Read more @ http://www.fóxnews.com/scitech/2011/10/ ... tury-code/