Encoded letters of 50,000 words employed by Mary, Queen of Scot decoded by the empiric

February 08, 2023 By Raulf Hernes

(Image Credit Google)

During her imprisonment by her cousin, Queen Elizabeth I, Mary, Queen of Scots, wrote 57 letters to and from various people, spanning the period from 1578 to 1584, just before she was beheaded on February 8, 1587. Mary was convicted of supporting an assassination plot against Elizabeth I, her cousin. The deciphered letters contained almost 50,000 words and 50 previously unknown scripts that Mary used in code when communicating with her associates. George Lasry, a computer scientist and member of the DECRYPT project, described the method of "hill climbing" from optimization problems. “We start off with a random key, decipher the ciphertext with that key, make some small changes to the key, and decipher again,” he said. If decryption is better, we keep the change; otherwise, we throw it away. Lasry and his collaborators, Norbert Biermann, a music teacher at the University of Künst Berlin, and Satoshi Tomokiyo, a physicist and patents expert, searched the Bibliotèque nationale de France’s online archives for encoded letters. Also Read: Helena Christensen flaunts her age-defying figure in a backless white swimsuit The trio discovered some uncategorized, encoded documents considered early 16th-century works in Italy. But upon further examination, they found they were in France and had nothing to do with Italy. The eureka moment for the team came when they found the name "Walsingham." Francis Walsingham was Elizabeth I's principal secretary, and his team decrypted enough of Mary's correspondence while she was in captivity to build a case for the Catholic royal's execution. Graphic: 2022 Lasry, Biermann, Tomokiyo

The team wrote in their paper that Walsingham is “frequently cited in letters; Mary warned Castelnau of his schemes in France and Scotland; she describes him in negative terms as a cunning individual who has offered his friendship while concealing his true intentions.” Mary also responds to the abduction of her teenage son, James, by a Scottish faction (the Ruthven Raid). Mary expresses her discontent at the results and her feeling that she and her son have been abandoned by France when the French king finally sends an envoy to Scotland, according to the team. Lasry said that this is just the first phase of the project, but that they are eager to see what information historians will be able to gain from the letters. The codebreaking process is time-consuming, Lasry said, as the 57 letters contained about 150,000 individual characters to crack. Libraries are excellent places to store documents, but remarkable materials can be lost and forgotten in the vast collections. In a Bristol library, researchers recently uncovered a rare version of King Arthur's legend penned 800 years ago, while in an 8th-century Old Testament manuscript, researchers discovered doodles by a woman named Eadburg. More information about her imprisonment and the amount of information she knew about work performed on her behalf by her collaborators could emerge if the Mary letters were studied more closely.

By Raulf Hernes

If you ask me raulf means ALL ABOUT TECH!!

Encoded letters of 50,000 words employed by Mary, Queen of Scot decoded by the empiric

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