The Republic of Codes

Here is another article about the development from Kircher's Ars Magna Scienta to Leibniz's Universal Character. The whole project of a philosophical language was to allow general thought to be calculated automatically in a way similar to how mathematical thought is calculated automatically. By studying cryptography and languages, they hoped to discover the key to artificial intelligence. By the way, the book by John Wilkins on this subject, An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language, proposed the ideas that would eventually become the metric system.