How AI can help decoding historical ciphers
Ciphers have been used throughout history and are still used today to hide secrets. But how can research in language, computer science, and history contribute to a deeper understanding of the thousands of historical ciphers that exist worldwide?
Beáta Megyesi, professor of computational linguistics has been leading the interdisciplinary research project DECRYPT. The project's aim is to create tools to more easily decode historical encrypted texts. Megyesi was one of the researchers who in 2011 managed to crack the Copiale cipher, written by the secret society the Oculists. This made her realize that to break more ciphers they needed data to create new tools.
“Our primary goal is to develop new methods and tools with the help of AI that can identify, transcribe and interpret historical ciphers, which can then be applied to new sources for new insights into our history.”
Decrypt: https://de-crypt.org/
00:00-00:54 – The history of ciphers
00:55-2:11 – Decoding the Copiale cipher
2:12-2:47 - Research of historical cryptology
2:48-3:19 - Creating tools to encrypt code
3:20-4:22 - AI models and the decode database
#cryptography #ciphers #cryptograms #copiale