<
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260527-plots-love-letters-and-diplomacy-the-medieval-secrets-being-revealed-by-ai>
“Deep in the archives of the Vatican library, a mysterious hand-written book,
scrawled with strange symbols, had lain unread for more than 400 years. Its
cryptic pages apparently concealed secret remedies "for afflictions of the
human body", according to some text scratched inside the cover. Such healing
practices were kept under wraps at the time since they could attract suspicion
or even accusations of witchcraft.
Known as the Borg cipher, the 408-page-long manuscript is mostly
incomprehensible – coded using 34 obscure symbols with a few Roman letters and
a front page written in Arabic. There was no known key to reveal what was
encrypted. Some of the pages are also damaged due to their age, making the code
even more challenging to read.
But with the help of machine learning – a form of artificial intelligence –
researchers were able to unravel the code. They discovered the text was filled
with thousands of bizarre treatments such as drinking several glasses of
high-quality red wine or fermenting a nutmeg in some dough to combat dysentery.
(You can see the full coded document online at the Vatican Library, shelfmark
Borg.lat.898).
"It is like detective work where every symbol, pattern, and partial solution
may bring us closer to someone's secrets and to a lost historical world," says
Beáta Megyesi, a professor in computational linguistics at Stockholm University
in Sweden, who was part of the team who decoded the text. Even with the help of
AI, the process of unlocking the cipher key was painstaking.
Now Megyesi and her colleagues are leading efforts to harness the power of AI
to crack historic ciphers more efficiently, potentially unlocking a wealth of
coded information from the past that has previously been uncrackable.”
Via Esther Schindler.
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
