The Mystery of the Voynich Manuscript

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/07/the-unread-the-mystery-of-the-voynich-manuscript.html

by ewoolery • 13 years ago

86 29 13 years ago

xk_id• 13 years ago

I found this scholarly article to be a concise summary of many interesting points: http://www.isi.edu/natural-language/people/voynich-11.pdf ("What we know about the Voynich manuscript" by Reddy S. and Knight K.).

floobynewb• 13 years ago

thank you

acqq2• 13 years ago

And I really believe this is the simplest and exact solution:

Rugg (2004) claims that words might have been generated using a ‘Cardan Grille’ – a way to deterministically generate words from a table of morphemes.

(Gordon Rugg. 2004. The mystery of the Voynich Manuscript. Scientific American Magazine.)

If you know there was a reasonably fast way to produce the content which has exactly observed properties, why searching for some more complicated explanation?

DanBC• 13 years ago

why searching for some more complicated explanation?

But why generate all that text using a cardan grille?

ferdo• 13 years ago

Obligatory link to an online copy. It's well worth the browse:

http://archive.org/details/TheVoynichManuscript

indubitably• 13 years ago

http://www.jasondavies.com/voynich/

contingencies• 13 years ago

The grandparent is faster, the parent is perhaps more detailed by default. I'd recommend the grandparent.

shmerl• 13 years ago

Direct Djvu link: http://ia700305.us.archive.org/6/items/TheVoynichManuscript/...

They use some Java wrapper which is pointless if you have a native Djvu plugin.

spiritplumber• 13 years ago

Obligatory link to the solution to the mystery: http://xkcd.com/593/

film42• 13 years ago

How much is the Voynich Manuscript currently worth?

zw123456• 13 years ago

Oblogatory (sic) link to article posted here a month ago http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22975809

shawn-butler• 13 years ago

I always thought Magnus was a better candidate than Bacon. But Lynn Thorndike said it wasn't; so that was pretty much the end of that.

rustynails• 13 years ago

Does anyone have an analysis of the drawings? How accurate are they? What about the detail of the human anatomy, is it comprehensive? Is there any meaning in the series of diagrams? These questions won't decode the text, but they may give an indication of the quality of the text. Based on a WAG, I'd say the book's text is not particularly informative, it is merely the "challenge" that generates the interest.

hobs2• 13 years ago

Exactly the challenge. I am pretty sure that I read they took http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law and applied it to the distrobution of words/letters and found that it does not match up with what people would call a language.

ianterrell• 13 years ago

The word frequency distribution follows Zipf’s law, which is a necessary (though not sufﬁcient) test of linguistic plausibility.

From http://www.isi.edu/natural-language/people/voynich-11.pdf, linked in another comment.

ChuckMcM3• 13 years ago

One wonders, when you consider things like this, if we ever have any hope of actually talking to a non-human intelligent species. Some human wrote this thing (and assuming they were not just pulling our leg, or as the XKCD comic guesses running some medieval D&D game) and we've tried for decades to figure it out. How could we possibly hope to even start on understanding a non-human document?

codezero3• 13 years ago

Whoever wrote this was either:

1) writing gibberish 2) writing in a coded language to hide the message

Neither of these would be the same as a coordinated attempt to communicate, even if it were asynchronous.

ChuckMcM3• 13 years ago

This interpretation is entirely possible, however there are two issues I have with that.

The first is that even in medieval times parchment wasn't cheap. It wasn't like anyone could get there hands on enough to make 200 pages of gibberish unless they were a relatively wealthy doodler.

The second is that were it in code, the sophistication of ciphers in the 1500's was hot high, and generally quite susceptible to the sort of forensic analysis that is covered in the ISI paper linked in the comments. As far as I am aware, the only cipher system, known at that time, that would not succumb would be a one time pad. And in the case of an OTP cipher it would reveal itself in other ways (lots of entropy in the words).

If it isn't clear, I do agree that it 'being in code' is the most likely reason it has not been deciphered, but that the cipher of that time is not breakable given what we know of 'plain text' of those times (the various languages it could have been written in) makes me wonder how we would fare against an alien communication (should we ever pick one up).

tiatia• 13 years ago

Wrong!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript#Exotic_natur...

coldcode• 13 years ago

Aliens are as likely an explanation as anything found so far. Given that no other examples of this language have been found it's hard to imagine it could be any real human one.

bgroins• 13 years ago

I think it's very easy to imagine that a real human wrote this book, since it's right in line with the materials available in the period. It's not written with some futuristic material like say... laser printer toner. Just because we can't translate something (which may just be gibberish) that doesn't prove the existence of aliens.

macspoofing• 13 years ago

Aliens are as likely an explanation as anything found so far.

That's quite the logical leap you took there. I think it's far far more likely that a human wrote this document.

orf• 13 years ago

So all samples of unknown languages are alien?

The Mystery of the Voynich Manuscript

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