The 19th Century document known as the Copiale Cipher turned out to be just that – a substitution cipher – although a complex one. Analysis of the 75,000-character document was carried out by a team of U.S. and Swedish information scientists and linguists led by Kevin Knight of the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute. They found many words that weren’t directly translatable, but that came close to being actual German words. An automatic computer attack that assumed a homomorphic cypher failed to decrypt the text but it did indicate numerically that German might be the underlying language.”]