Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey Brains to
Speaker 1: Floor and Vogelbomb. Here. From the pharaohs of ancient Egypt
Speaker 1: to the warring kingdoms of medieval Europe, humans have had
Speaker 1: plenty of good reasons to send secret messages. If you
Speaker 1: wanted to keep military plans from the enemy or keep
Speaker 1: an illicit affair from your partner, you wrote it down
Speaker 1: as a cipher. That is, a coded message that can
Speaker 1: only be unlocked by someone possessing the key. Before the
Speaker 1: computer age, if a historian came across a coded message
Speaker 1: and an archive of material, they would usually skip over
Speaker 1: it because it just wasn't worth the trouble. Even ancient
Speaker 1: ciphers can be nearly impossible to crack with just a
Speaker 1: pencil and paper. But what juicy historical secrets were trapped
Speaker 1: in those ancient puzzles. For the article this episode is
Speaker 1: based on, has Stuff Works spoke with Craig P. Bauer,
Speaker 1: a math professor at York College of Pennsylvania and editor
Speaker 1: in chief of the journal Cryptologia. He said, if you're
Speaker 1: looking through a diary and you come across a passage
Speaker 1: that's enciphered, you know that's the best part. When a
Speaker 1: message can't be read, the sky's the limit. It can
Speaker 1: be absolutely anything. It can resolve a historic mystery or
Speaker 1: shed new light on the personality of a historic figure.
Speaker 1: Maybe history itself is rewritten, and Bower should know. His
Speaker 1: journal made history in February of twenty twenty three by
Speaker 1: publishing the work of three amateur codebreakers who decrypted a
Speaker 1: trove of secret letters written by Mary, Queen of Scots.
Speaker 1: The encoded letters date to the fifteen hundreds, during Mary's
Speaker 1: nineteen year imprisonment by Queen Elizabeth the First and show
Speaker 1: how Mary remained a shrewd political operative even while locked
Speaker 1: away in a castle. The letters contain about fifty thousand
Speaker 1: words of writing, enough to fill a book. Historians are
Speaker 1: sure to be digging into them for a good while. Interestingly,
Speaker 1: they're mostly addressed to the French ambassador to England at
Speaker 1: the time, and indicate that Mary was directly or indirectly
Speaker 1: in touch with many of the major players in Elizabeth's court.
Speaker 1: The team that cracked the letters harnessed powerful codebreaking technology
Speaker 1: that wasn't available even a decade ago, and those new
Speaker 1: tools have ushered in what Bauer calls the Second Golden
Speaker 1: age of decipherment. The question is what secrets will these
Speaker 1: historical codebreakers uncover? Next, let's talk about historical cryptology. Cryptology
Speaker 1: is the study of both writing and breaking codes. When
Speaker 1: we think of cryptologists, we might picture someone like the
Speaker 1: British mathematician Alan Turing, who cracked Nazi Germany's infamous Enigma
Speaker 1: machine during World War Two. But cryptologists don't just work
Speaker 1: for intelligence agencies. There are also amateur codebreakers who are
Speaker 1: fascinated with solving historical puzzles. A Bower is one of them.
Speaker 1: He wrote a book called Unsolved, The History and Mystery
Speaker 1: of the World's Greatest Ciphers from Ancient Egypt to online
Speaker 1: secret societies. In it, he cataloged some of the biggest
Speaker 1: ciphers that historical cryptologists are itching to crack. The Zodiac
Speaker 1: cipher used to be one of them. For fifty one years,
Speaker 1: no one could solve the riddle of the three hundred
Speaker 1: and forty character coded message written in nineteen sixty nine
Speaker 1: by the infamous Zodiac Killer, and then a team of
Speaker 1: amateur cryptologists cracked it in twenty twenty one using supercomputers
Speaker 1: and custom decryption software. The killer's identity still remains a mystery,
Speaker 1: though in recent years, historical cryptologists have broken ciphers created
Speaker 1: by the KKK, Marie Antoinette, and the Masons. They even
Speaker 1: figured out how to decrypt the infamous RAHNK Codex, an
Speaker 1: ancient illustrated manuscript discovered in the eighteen thirties that's written
Speaker 1: in an unknown language. A. Bauer is quick to point
Speaker 1: out that it takes more than just raw computing power
Speaker 1: to break an ancient code. He said, a good historical
Speaker 1: cryptologist has to be part countant, able to very carefully
Speaker 1: keep track of numbers and statistics, but they also need
Speaker 1: to have the spirit of Mozart. You have to be
Speaker 1: very creative and almost a psychologist to guess the keywords
Speaker 1: or phrases to unlock the cipher. It requires a combination
Speaker 1: of creativity, powerful computers, and persistence. If you lose one
Speaker 1: leg of that stool, you won't find a solution. The
Speaker 1: team who deciphered Queen Mary's code used a process called
Speaker 1: hill climbing, where a computer randomly assigns the symbols and
Speaker 1: the cipher two letters of the alphabet, decrypts the whole message,
Speaker 1: scores it based on readability, and then repeats the process
Speaker 1: only keeping the changes that increase the score of the translation.
Speaker 1: After the code was cracked, the cryptologists still needed to
Speaker 1: decipher the coded letters one word at a time and
Speaker 1: edit transcriptions, a process that took a year. Every cipher
Speaker 1: is created by some kind of algorithm or formula, and
Speaker 1: Bauer says that encryption algorithms can be extremely complex, like
Speaker 1: the unbreakable end to end encryption that safeguards data traveling
Speaker 1: across the Internet, or extremely simple alike Julius Caesar's formula
Speaker 1: in which he shifted each letter in the alphabet three
Speaker 1: letters over. In cryptology terms, Caesar's method is called transposition.
Speaker 1: That's any system that moves the letters of the alphabet
Speaker 1: around or scrambles their order. A transposition cipher appears a
Speaker 1: few times in the Hebrew Bible, in which the first
Speaker 1: letter of the alphabet is swapped with the last letter,
Speaker 1: the second letter with the second to last, and so on.
Speaker 1: A far more difficult cipher to solve is one that
Speaker 1: employs substitution, in which the letters or words in the
Speaker 1: original message are replaced by other random letters, numbers, or symbols.
Speaker 1: Substitution ciphers are created by using a key or a
Speaker 1: cipher alphabet. A Mary, Queen of Scots, used a cipher
Speaker 1: alphabet that replaced each word with a unique symbols. Such
Speaker 1: a cipher could only be decoded by someone possessing the
Speaker 1: same key. To make a cipher even harder to crack,
Speaker 1: two different cipher keys could be employed simultaneously. These are
Speaker 1: called polyalphabetic ciphers. So maybe you use one key for
Speaker 1: the first word of a sentence and a different key
Speaker 1: for the second word. Null symbols might be added that
Speaker 1: have no meaning, just to throw off the codebreakers. Another
Speaker 1: trick is to assign several different symbols to the most
Speaker 1: common words, a tactic called homophonic substitution. The three guys
Speaker 1: who solved the Queen Mary mystery all have day jobs.
Speaker 1: George Lassary is a computer scientist living in Israel. Norbert
Speaker 1: Bierman is a music professor in Germany, and Satoshi Tomokio
Speaker 1: is an atrophysicist in Japan. They each had a passion
Speaker 1: for historical ciphers, but it's unlikely any one of them
Speaker 1: would have solved the riddle all on their own. The
Speaker 1: three men found each other as part of the decrypt project,
Speaker 1: and international effort to bring historians and cryptologists together and
Speaker 1: give them the computational tools to decipherb ancient encrypted texts.
Speaker 1: In the past, codebreakers and historians mostly worked on stubborn
Speaker 1: problems in isolation, but that's changing, Bowers said. A lot
Speaker 1: of the great work in cryptology is done in teams
Speaker 1: of two or more people. George Laspree has established himself
Speaker 1: as the best codebreaker outside of the government. He and
Speaker 1: his teammates are tearing things up. Today's episode is based
Speaker 1: on the article why historical cryptologists need to be part Mozart,
Speaker 1: part accountant on houstofworks dot com, written by Dave Bruce.
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