![]() With his stylish rectangular glasses, mop of prematurely white hair, and wiry surfer's build, he didn't look like a typical quant. The featured speaker was Kevin Knight, a University of Southern California specialist in machine translation-the use of algorithms to automatically translate one language into another. ![]() She preferred musty books to new technologies and didn't even have an Internet connection at home. Ordinarily talks like this gave her a headache. Thirteen years later, in January 2011, Schaefer attended an Uppsala conference on computational linguistics. Courtesy of Niedersä Landesarchiv-Staatsarchiv Wolfenbüttel Membership in all but the biggest died out over a century ago, and many of their encrypted texts have remained uncracked, dismissed by historians as impenetrable novelties.Ī note from October 30, 1775. But largely because they were so secretive, little is known about most of these organizations. Dismissed today as fodder for conspiracy theorists and History Channel specials, they once served an important purpose: Their lodges were safe houses where freethinkers could explore everything from the laws of physics to the rights of man to the nature of God, all hidden from the oppressive, authoritarian eyes of church and state. At the peak of their power, these clandestine organizations, most notably the Freemasons, had hundreds of thousands of adherents, from colonial New York to imperial St. They were hidden in a coded manuscript, one of thousands produced by secret societies in the 18th and 19th centuries. Illustration: WIRED Staffįor more than 260 years, the contents of that page-and the details of this ritual-remained a secret. This story appears in the December 2012 issue.
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