Computer scientist cracks mysterious 'Copiale Cipher'

ScienceDaily (Oct. 25, 2011) — The manuscript seems straight out of fiction: a strange, handwritten message in abstract symbols and Roman letters meticulously covering 105 yellowing pages hidden in the depths of an academic archive.

Now, more than three centuries after it was devised, the 75,000-character Copiale Cipher finally has been broken.

The mysterious cryptogram, bound in gold and green brocade paper, reveals the rituals and political leanings of an 18th-century secret society in Germany. The rituals detailed in the document indicate the society had a fascination with eye surgery and ophthalmology, though it seems members of the society were not eye doctors.

"This opens up a window for people who study the history of ideas and the history of secret societies," said computer scientist Kevin Knight of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, part of the international team that finally cracked the cipher. "Historians believe that secret societies have had a role in revolutions, but all that is yet to be worked out, and a big part of the reason is because so many documents are enciphered."

To break the cipher, Knight and colleagues Beáta Megyesi and Christiane Schaefer of Uppsala University in Sweden tracked down the original manuscript, which was found in the East Berlin Academy after the Cold War and now is in a private collection. They transcribed a machine-readable version of the text, using a computer program created by Knight to help quantify the co-occurrences of certain symbols and other patterns.

"When you get a new code and look at it, the possibilities are nearly infinite," Knight said. "Once you come up with a hypothesis based on your intuition as a human, you can turn over a lot of grunt work to the computer."

With the cipher, the codebreaking team began not even knowing the language of the encrypted document. But because they had a hunch about the Roman and Greek characters distributed throughout the manuscript, they isolated these from the abstract symbols and attacked it as the true code.

"It took quite a long time and resulted in complete failure," Knight said.

After trying 80 languages, the cryptography team realized the Roman characters were "nulls" intended to mislead the reader. It was the abstract symbols that held the message.

The team later tested the hypothesis that abstract symbols with similar shapes represented the same letter or groups of letters. Eventually, the first meaningful words of German emerged: "Ceremonies of Initiation," followed by "Secret Section."

For more information about the method of decipherment, visit http://stp.lingfil.uu.se/%7Ebea/copiale/

Knight now is targeting other coded messages, including ciphers sent by the Zodiac Killer, a serial murderer who sent taunting messages to the press and has never been caught. Knight also is applying his computer-assisted codebreaking software to other famous unsolved codes such as the last section of "Kryptos," an encrypted message carved into a granite sculpture on the grounds of CIA headquarters, and the Voynich Manuscript, a medieval document that has baffled professional cryptographers for decades.

But for Knight, the trickiest language puzzle of all is still everyday speech. A senior research scientist in the Intelligent Systems Division of the USC Information Sciences Institute, Knight is one of the world's leading experts on machine translation -- teaching computers to turn Chinese into English or Arabic into Korean.

"Translation remains a tough challenge for artificial intelligence," said Knight, whose translation software has been adopted by Apple and Intel, among other companies.

With researcher Sujith Ravi, who received a Ph.D. in computer science from USC in 2011, Knight has been approaching translation as a cryptographic problem, which could not only improve human language translation but also could be useful in translating languages that are not currently spoken by humans, including ancient languages and animal communication.

The National Science Foundation funded Knight's cryptography and translation research. The Copiale Cipher work was presented as part of an invited presentation at this year's meeting of The Association for Computational Linguistics.

For a video on Kevin Knight and the Copiale Cipher, visit http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eam0Tk-1FyI

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Southern California. The original article was written by Suzanne Wu.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

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Astronomers explain blue stragglers: How do mysterious stars stay so young?

ScienceDaily (Oct. 20, 2011) — Mysterious "blue stragglers" are old stars that appear younger than they should be: they burn hot and blue. Several theories have attempted to explain why they don't show their age, but, until now, scientists have lacked the crucial observations with which to test each hypothesis.

Armed with such observational data, two astronomers from Northwestern University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison report that a mechanism known as mass transfer explains the origins of the blue stragglers. Essentially, a blue straggler eats up the mass, or outer envelope, of its giant-star companion. This extra fuel allows the straggler to continue to burn and live longer while the companion star is stripped bare, leaving only its white dwarf core.

The scientists report their evidence in a study to be published Oct. 20 by the journal Nature.

The majority of blue stragglers in their study are in binaries: they have a companion star. "It's really the companion star that helped us determine where the blue straggler comes from," said Northwestern astronomer Aaron M. Geller, first author of the study. "The companion stars orbit at periods of about 1,000 days, and we have evidence that the companions are white dwarfs. Both point directly to an origin from mass transfer."

Geller is the Lindheimer Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA) and the department of physics and astronomy in Northwestern's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. Robert Mathieu, professor of astronomy and chair of the astronomy department at UW-Madison, is co-author of the study.

The astronomers studied the NGC 188 open cluster, which is in the constellation Cepheus, situated in the sky near Polaris, the North Star. This cluster is one of the most ancient open star clusters, but it features these mysterious young blue stragglers.

The cluster has around 3,000 stars, all about the same age, and has 21 blue stragglers. Geller and Mathieu are the first to use detailed observational data from the WIYN Observatory in Tucson, Ariz., of the blue stragglers in NGC 188.

They used the information to analyze and compare the three main theories of blue straggler formation: collisions between stars, mergers of stars and mass transfer from one star to another. The only one left standing was the theory of mass transfer.

The light from the blue stragglers' companion stars is not actually visible in Geller and Mathieu's observations. While the companions haven't been seen directly, their effect on the blue stragglers is evident: each companion pulls gravitationally on its blue straggler and creates a "wobble" as it orbits, and this allows astronomers to measure the mass of the companion stars. The WIYN data show that each companion star is about half the mass of the sun, which is consistent with a white dwarf.

The other two origin theories -- collisions and mergers -- require the companion stars to be more massive than what is observed. In fact, in both scenarios, some of the companion stars could be bright enough to be visible in the WIYN data, which is not the case.

"We think we have a good understanding of stellar evolution, but it doesn't predict blue stragglers," Geller said. "People have been trying to explain the origin of blue stragglers since their discovery in 1953, and now we have the detailed observations needed to identify how they were created. I've always enjoyed trying to get to the bottom of a mystery."

"As so often happens in astronomy, it is the objects that you don't see that provide the critical clues," said Mathieu, an expert on binary stars. "Now we will use the Hubble Space Telescope to search for the ultraviolet light in which white dwarf secondary stars shine."

Geller, Mathieu and their colleagues will have, in about a year's time, observations from Hubble that will tell them if the blue stragglers' companions are indeed white dwarfs.

The NGC 188 data set was collected during the last decade by the 3.5-meter WIYN Telescope on Kitt Peak, Ariz., as part of the WIYN Open Cluster Study led by Mathieu. The observatory is operated by UW-Madison, Indiana University, Yale University and the National Optical Astronomical Observatory (NOAO).

NOAO is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy Inc. (AURA) under a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation.

The National Science Foundation, the Wisconsin Space Grant Consortium and the Lindheimer Fellowship at Northwestern University supported the research.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Northwestern University. The original article was written by Megan Fellman.

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Journal Reference:

Aaron M. Geller, Robert D. Mathieu. A mass transfer origin for blue stragglers in NGC 188 as revealed by half-solar-mass companions. Nature, 2011; 478 (7369): 356 DOI: 10.1038/nature10512

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

View the original article here

Astronomers explain blue stragglers: How do mysterious stars stay so young?

ScienceDaily (Oct. 20, 2011) — Mysterious "blue stragglers" are old stars that appear younger than they should be: they burn hot and blue. Several theories have attempted to explain why they don't show their age, but, until now, scientists have lacked the crucial observations with which to test each hypothesis.

Armed with such observational data, two astronomers from Northwestern University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison report that a mechanism known as mass transfer explains the origins of the blue stragglers. Essentially, a blue straggler eats up the mass, or outer envelope, of its giant-star companion. This extra fuel allows the straggler to continue to burn and live longer while the companion star is stripped bare, leaving only its white dwarf core.

The scientists report their evidence in a study to be published Oct. 20 by the journal Nature.

The majority of blue stragglers in their study are in binaries: they have a companion star. "It's really the companion star that helped us determine where the blue straggler comes from," said Northwestern astronomer Aaron M. Geller, first author of the study. "The companion stars orbit at periods of about 1,000 days, and we have evidence that the companions are white dwarfs. Both point directly to an origin from mass transfer."

Geller is the Lindheimer Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA) and the department of physics and astronomy in Northwestern's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. Robert Mathieu, professor of astronomy and chair of the astronomy department at UW-Madison, is co-author of the study.

The astronomers studied the NGC 188 open cluster, which is in the constellation Cepheus, situated in the sky near Polaris, the North Star. This cluster is one of the most ancient open star clusters, but it features these mysterious young blue stragglers.

The cluster has around 3,000 stars, all about the same age, and has 21 blue stragglers. Geller and Mathieu are the first to use detailed observational data from the WIYN Observatory in Tucson, Ariz., of the blue stragglers in NGC 188.

They used the information to analyze and compare the three main theories of blue straggler formation: collisions between stars, mergers of stars and mass transfer from one star to another. The only one left standing was the theory of mass transfer.

The light from the blue stragglers' companion stars is not actually visible in Geller and Mathieu's observations. While the companions haven't been seen directly, their effect on the blue stragglers is evident: each companion pulls gravitationally on its blue straggler and creates a "wobble" as it orbits, and this allows astronomers to measure the mass of the companion stars. The WIYN data show that each companion star is about half the mass of the sun, which is consistent with a white dwarf.

The other two origin theories -- collisions and mergers -- require the companion stars to be more massive than what is observed. In fact, in both scenarios, some of the companion stars could be bright enough to be visible in the WIYN data, which is not the case.

"We think we have a good understanding of stellar evolution, but it doesn't predict blue stragglers," Geller said. "People have been trying to explain the origin of blue stragglers since their discovery in 1953, and now we have the detailed observations needed to identify how they were created. I've always enjoyed trying to get to the bottom of a mystery."

"As so often happens in astronomy, it is the objects that you don't see that provide the critical clues," said Mathieu, an expert on binary stars. "Now we will use the Hubble Space Telescope to search for the ultraviolet light in which white dwarf secondary stars shine."

Geller, Mathieu and their colleagues will have, in about a year's time, observations from Hubble that will tell them if the blue stragglers' companions are indeed white dwarfs.

The NGC 188 data set was collected during the last decade by the 3.5-meter WIYN Telescope on Kitt Peak, Ariz., as part of the WIYN Open Cluster Study led by Mathieu. The observatory is operated by UW-Madison, Indiana University, Yale University and the National Optical Astronomical Observatory (NOAO).

NOAO is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy Inc. (AURA) under a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation.

The National Science Foundation, the Wisconsin Space Grant Consortium and the Lindheimer Fellowship at Northwestern University supported the research.

Recommend this story on Facebook, Twitter,
and Google +1:

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Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Northwestern University. The original article was written by Megan Fellman.

Note: ScienceDaily reserves the right to edit materials for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

Journal Reference:

Aaron M. Geller, Robert D. Mathieu. A mass transfer origin for blue stragglers in NGC 188 as revealed by half-solar-mass companions. Nature, 2011; 478 (7369): 356 DOI: 10.1038/nature10512

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

View the original article here