French scientists decode 500-year-old letter | Hacker News Reader

French scientists decode 500-year-old letter

bbc.co.uk

86 pointspmoriarty7 comments

Amazing work. Pity the article doesn't have details as the researcher and their team are still finishing the academic paper. Here's the researcher website (couldn't find social media to follow up about the paper):

- https://members.loria.fr/CPierrot/

Does anyone know if there is a Wikipedia page that collects documents that are pending translation or code-breaking like the letter in the article? I searched but the closest I found was a list of cryptography challenges.

Dupe: "Emperor Charles V's code cracked after five centuries"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33739437 (122 points | 1 day ago | 29 comments)

Not really a dupe - that article says very little about what the letter said or about the code.

Unlocking history - fascinating.

These two quotes in the article seem somehow incongruous:

"Simply putting it into a computer and telling the computer to work it out would literally have taken longer than the history of the universe!"

"Of course by today's standards it is pretty basic."

I think that is using a brute force method of cracking. Even though much of the code is a substitution, the absence of letters, the mixing of symbols with words, and the diacritics would make it hard for a computer to crack.

I imagine the brute force computer may run into a case where it can make sense of many of the words using substitution and then plateau without completely cracking it.

So cool that the creators of the cipher were accounting for the probability distribution of common characters. Giovan Battista Bellas published his implementation of the Vigenère cipher in 1553[1], and this letter was encoded a few years before that. Very cutting edge work for the time.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovan_Battista_Bellaso

cecile is an incredible cryptographer, i am very proud of her accomplishment

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