French scientists decode 500-year-old letter

Re:French scientists decode 500-year-old letter by martinclayton on Sunday November 27, 2022 @07:41AM (#33762577)

Unlocking history - fascinating.

These two quotes in the article seem somehow incongruous:

"Simply putting it into a computer and telling the computer to work it out would literally have taken longer than the history of the universe!"

"Of course by today's standards it is pretty basic."

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Re:French scientists decode 500-year-old letter by twobitshifter on Sunday November 27, 2022 @09:33AM (#33763178)

I think that is using a brute force method of cracking. Even though much of the code is a substitution, the absence of letters, the mixing of symbols with words, and the diacritics would make it hard for a computer to crack.

I imagine the brute force computer may run into a case where it can make sense of many of the words using substitution and then plateau without completely cracking it.

[ Parent | on HN ]