History, decoded. (cover story)

Features The Vatican's archives contain thousands of manuscripts that are encrypted BEATA MEGYESI strode past the Pontifical Swiss Guards, in their Renaissance-era uniforms. Then there are ciphers that involve translations of letters, for example swapping the first and last letters of every word before you can read the plaintext. Lasry showed that Bourbon used a cipher that is neither polyphonic nor homophonic, but polyhomophonic - in other words, some of its individual cipher symbols can represent several plaintext letters, but equally each plaintext letter can be represented by several different cipher symbols. Megyesi had the opportunity to use the Vatican's encrypted papers for a project with an audacious goal: to fully automate the process of decrypting historical ciphers so that many thousands of otherwise inaccessible letters could finally speak to us from down the centuries. [Extracted from the article]

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