This is very cool. As the LAT article says, it’s not really a case of “computer decipherment”. The statistical NLP (natural language processing) analysis produced reference data to check hypotheses against, and computing did the grunt work of substitution. The rest was very clever guessing. And it turned out to be a simple substitution cipher.
Here’s the page with the ACL paper and copies of the manuscript and decipherments:
How good for Kevin that he achieved this. How sad for us that the text wasn’t the secret recipe to turning pig iron into gold. Unless of course, Kevin is deceiving everyone. Keep an eye on him. See if he starts buying stuff.
Yes … But you gotta admit that a secret Masonic cult obsessed with eyeglasses is a pretty weird result. For all we know, Lenscrafters and Specsavers are actually run by the Knights Templar. Now they’re going to kidnap Kevin and give him the Clockwork Orange treatment. This linguistics business is dangerous stuff!
When I was a kid I sent away several Cheerios boxtops for a Captain Midnight decoder ring, so I could
decode the secret messages read off at the end of the radio shows: L4, B6, R2… It was pure agony
not being in on those messages, but greater agony still as the months passed and I waited, waited…
for the ring. Finally it came. I wrote down the coded message at the end of the show
and turned the bezel of the ring to get the letters—‘Eat Cheerios!’
I idly read a bit of the English transcription, and when it got to the esoteric treating-of-the-eyes ritual part I was baffled and amazed at how the weary hours can drive human nature to find ways to make more of itself and its pursuits than is sensible. I thought I’d seen mountains made out of molehills before, but for me that was a pomposity that took my frickin’ cake. Plus it’s conceptually boring. Hermetic oculists. I mean, please.
I realise that my perspective is wholly due to my being a product of the Age of Reason. And a good thing it is, too.
