The next step is to take a whole lot of educated guesses about what the key might be. That narrows the number of possible keys from billions to merely millions. ( Q is usually followed by a u, for example, and "quiet" is rarely followed by "bulldozer.") There are only so many translation schemes that will work with these grammatical parameters. We know the rules and statistics of English: which words go together, which sounds the language employs, and which pairs of letters appear most often. And there are billions of possible word combinations.īut there are ways to make all of this more manageable.
Grammar varies widely from language to language. Words have multiple meanings, depending on context. Except that the key for translating Russian into English is far more complex. Establishing that type of rule set, or "key," is the main goal of machine translators too. In code-breaking, he explained, the central job is to figure out the set of rules for turning the cipher's text into plain words: which letters should be swapped, when to turn a phrase on its head, when to ignore a word altogether.
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Knight was part of an extremely small group of machine-translation researchers who treated foreign languages like ciphers-as if Russian, for example, were just a series of cryptological symbols representing English words.
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Soon he hoped to cook up software that could understand the meaning of poems and even generate verses of its own. He built an algorithm that would translate Dante's Inferno based on the user's choice of meter and rhyme scheme. His projects were endearingly quirky too. Knight spoke in a near whisper yet with intensity and passion. With his stylish rectangular glasses, mop of prematurely white hair, and wiry surfer's build, he didn't look like a typical quant. The featured speaker was Kevin Knight, a University of Southern California specialist in machine translation-the use of algorithms to automatically translate one language into another. She preferred musty books to new technologies and didn't even have an Internet connection at home. Ordinarily talks like this gave her a headache. Thirteen years later, in January 2011, Schaefer attended an Uppsala conference on computational linguistics. Courtesy of Niedersä Landesarchiv-Staatsarchiv Wolfenbüttel Membership in all but the biggest died out over a century ago, and many of their encrypted texts have remained uncracked, dismissed by historians as impenetrable novelties.Ī note from October 30, 1775. But largely because they were so secretive, little is known about most of these organizations. Dismissed today as fodder for conspiracy theorists and History Channel specials, they once served an important purpose: Their lodges were safe houses where freethinkers could explore everything from the laws of physics to the rights of man to the nature of God, all hidden from the oppressive, authoritarian eyes of church and state.
At the peak of their power, these clandestine organizations, most notably the Freemasons, had hundreds of thousands of adherents, from colonial New York to imperial St. They were hidden in a coded manuscript, one of thousands produced by secret societies in the 18th and 19th centuries. Illustration: WIRED Staffįor more than 260 years, the contents of that page-and the details of this ritual-remained a secret. This story appears in the December 2012 issue.
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