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The Mystery of the Voynich Manuscript
- xk_id 13y agoI found this scholarly article to be a concise summary of many interesting points: http://www.isi.edu/natural-language/people/voynich-11.pdf http://www.isi.edu/natural-language/people/voynich-11.pdf ("What we know about the Voynich manuscript" by Reddy S. and Knight K.).
- floobynewb 13y agothank you
- acqq 13y agoAnd 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?
- ferdo 13y agoObligatory link to an online copy. It's well worth the browse: http://archive.org/details/TheVoynichManuscript http://archive.org/details/TheVoynichManuscript
- indubitably 13y agohttp://www.jasondavies.com/voynich/ http://www.jasondavies.com/voynich/
- contingencies 13y agoThe grandparent is faster, the parent is perhaps more detailed by default. I'd recommend the grandparent.
- shmerl 13y agoDirect Djvu link: http://ia700305.us.archive.org/6/items/TheVoynichManuscript/Voynich_Manuscript.djvu http://ia700305.us.archive.org/6/items/TheVoynichManuscript/... They use some Java wrapper which is pointless if you have a native Djvu plugin.
- spiritplumber 13y agoObligatory link to the solution to the mystery: http://xkcd.com/593/ http://xkcd.com/593/
- film42 13y agoHow much is the Voynich Manuscript currently worth?
- zw123456 13y agoOblogatory (sic) link to article posted here a month ago http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22975809 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22975809
- shawn-butler 13y agoI 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 13y agoDoes 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.
- hobs 13y agoExactly the challenge. I am pretty sure that I read they took http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law 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 13y 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 http://www.isi.edu/natural-language/people/voynich-11.pdf, linked in another comment.
- hobs 13y agoOh reaaally. Interesting, I will read up because I had heard the exact opposite, and clearly my source is wrong! (my brain)
- ChuckMcM 13y agoOne 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?
- codezero 13y agoWhoever 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.
- ChuckMcM 13y agoThis 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).
- codezero 13y agoI just think its unlikely that an alien message would be coded. Our own messages sent with intent to space are not just unenciphered, they include a lot of meta data to make finding the patterns required to understand it easier. If instead we used a one time pad, we wouldn't have much luck reaching out to aliens. This points to the more likely scenario that the manuscript isn't encoded at all (gibberish) or it was meant to be understood by only one person.
- coldcode 13y agoAliens 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 13y agoI 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 13y 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 13y agoSo all samples of unknown languages are alien?