How machine translation helped discover a secret society

For most of us, secret societies are relegated to the fictional realm of Dan Brown novels, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t real. In the December issue of Wired — and now available online — Noah Shachtman delves into the fascinating story of a 250-year-old document that helped shed new light on a virtually unknown secret order. The code — a seemingly mish-mashed collection of symbols and letters — went undeciphered for decades, until a machine translation specialist eventually cracked it. It’s a fascinating story, so be sure to read the whole thing at the source link below.