Making The Case That Voynich Is A Hoax 382
DeadVulcan writes "The Voynich Manuscript, a mysterious book of uncertain age, is widely believed to be written either in an unknown language or a long-lost encryption scheme. Nature reports that computer scientist Gordon Rugg has demonstrated that it's possible to generate a text like the Voynich manuscript -- containing language-like regularities, despite being potentially meaningless -- using cryptographic techniques of the time. This lends some support to those who claim that the book is a hoax."
My 2 cents (Score:3, Funny)
Re:My 2 cents (Score:5, Informative)
Ich denke sein vermutlich einen
Translation from German from binary:
I probably think its one
Re:My 2 cents (Score:2, Funny)
Re:My 2 cents (Score:2)
I'm just not sure where would be a logical place to start.
Re:My 2 cents (Score:3, Funny)
"I thinking be probably a pot of slice".
Re:My 2 cents (Score:2)
Representations of a known language are known as codes or alphabets. Binary is just a code, just like Morse "code". If the code/alphabet can be read as a language and can be converted from each other without replacing any of the words...
Just like a number is same when it is in base 16, 10, 8 or 2. It means the same thing, same number of beads.
A character-by-character replacement of a given set of symbols to an other simply means code.
The Salamander Papers (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The Salamander Papers (Score:2, Interesting)
(I know this 'cause I was a member, once.)
Ershlap? (Score:4, Funny)
Bli, Fal.
Re:Ershlap? (Score:5, Funny)
Am I fired yet?
The Voynich manuscript (Score:5, Funny)
Been there, done that (Score:4, Funny)
That's funny. I thought Darl McBride had already proven that with all those open letters he's written.
Mod me down, hippies!
Library of Babel (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Library of Babel (Score:3, Informative)
Missing the fact.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Missing the fact.... (Score:2)
Wanna know something, I thought of the same thing. Out of boredom one day in like 2000 I wrote ghost in the shell [antioffline.com], and I was going to rewrite it to make it more informative. Only this time I set out to do something sort of like a caesar cipher based scheme only it would've been a forward/reverse scheme.
Using a preselected number (ala rot13) I took a letter and manually (no pc) set the number 16 to my base. So the letter a was now p. The next shift would have been reversed 15 spaces so if b was the next let
Re:Missing the fact.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Missing a (cryptographic) clue ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Champolion cracked the Rosetta stone with much much less.
The 'true' examples of lost written languages/cyphers (do a google search) are mysteries because there exist few examples of brief length usually bereft of context (of grammar, history, linguistic evolution etc.).
The sheer volume of the Voynich manuscript, plus its origin in relatively modern Europe is what makes it so interesting to amateur cryptographers.
The Nature Paper is too brief to know how good Rugg's analysis is (and the Cryptologia site has been slashdotted), but if it holds up it is an interesting result, even if it is a conclusion that many "very smart cryptographers"(TM) have suspected for a long time
Re: Missing a (cryptographic) clue ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Surely it will never be deciphered if it is in an unknown language.> But, a volume of self consistent language (even a made up one) of over a hundred pages of text with accompanying pictures should fall to statistical and linguistic analysis.
I doubt it. How many possible mappings are there between strings of characters and meanings? And even with plausible interpretations of the pictures (e.g., a herbarium), the number of things that might be said in that context is for all purposes unbounded:
> Champolion cracked the Rosetta stone with much much less.
Actually, he had the benefit of a parallel text.
In the absence of a parallel text, this will only be decyphered the way Linear B was: after a rigorous analysis of the patterns in the text, and a much tighter context (essentially lists of <picture,name,number> tuples), it was noticed that some very obvious translations ("man" and "woman", or such) fit the inflectional pattern of a language historically spoken in the region where the texts were found, and that simple mapping could be extended to other obvious <picture,name> pairs without introducing inconsistencies.
I suppose it's possible that something similar could be done with the manuscript, but IMO only if there are some clearly labeled images that give tight enough a context to guess the specific word being used. And then some luck, because somebody has to recognize some language-specific patterns (such as the Greek masculine/feminine inflectional suffixes). And of course, more luck in what language it happens to be: Linear B might never have been deciphered if Greek didn't use gender-based patterns in its noun declensions.
If it happens to be written in some unknown language, IMO it will never be deciphered.
Re: Missing a (cryptographic) clue ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Imagine attacking common words and phrases. If you read an english text, you would quickly notice words like "the" "a" "and", and it was a letter stuff like "you" and "me" Once you have a large set of common words and phrases you look at how they are placed and structured, and start making quali
Re: Missing a (cryptographic) clue ... (Score:2, Insightful)
I think that this is an interesting curiosity but possibly a sad one for our age. It's hard to find people with heavy skills in dead languages nowadays.
On a more discouraging note, once you throw encryption into the picture and add it to an unknown(?) inflected language, you see that the problem will require the asse
Re: Missing a (cryptographic) clue ... (Score:3, Informative)
> I can see how this could be done as a really big simultaneous equation where the coefficients are dummy values for verb/noun etc with a parallel set of equation based on the grammar rules (combination), then variance analysis to eliminate the typos. Pretty elementary.
If you think it's pretty elementary you should write it up and publish it, since doing so would make your name an instant household word in fields ranging from philology to computer science, and probably also harvest you a fine crop of
Re:Missing the fact.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Making up a language, that isn't just a scrambled version of an existing one, is very, very hard. It takes someone like Tolkien (a professor of Old English who could translate Norse on the fly) to do that convincingly, and I doubt that anyone in the period could have done it in a way that would still defy detection.
Re:Missing the fact.... (Score:2)
Re:Missing the fact.... (Score:2)
Yes; but the theoretical, abstract knowledge of language that you'd need to make up a novel, believable one didn't exist. Of course, a genius could appear and work it out for himself.
Re:Missing the fact.... (Score:2)
And then there are the folks who can wix up mords, mometimes in sid-sentence, on fle thy. (Yes, I'm just as fluent when speaking as well. With dome sifficulty, I man wix up three cords as well.)
I don't know if it was a side effect of all the programming I've done, or just some latent dyslexia, but I'm able to mix up words and invent new ones with relative ease. Perhaps the challenge of having to remember umpteen different passwords, and change them ever
Re:Missing the fact.... (Score:2, Informative)
Beale Papers (Score:5, Interesting)
Dan East
Re:Beale Papers (Score:3, Funny)
Ridiculous (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Ridiculous (Score:5, Interesting)
There is no clear evidence pointing to an exact date that the manuscript was written, and the only firm circumstantial evidence we have to go on is Marcus Marci's letter to Anasthasius Kirchir, which mentions that the manuscript was sold to King Rudolph for 600 ducats. That is a heck of a lot of money. It seems perfectly reasonable to me that someone manufactured the manuscript to extract 600 ducats from the emperor.
This assumes a lot. It assumes that the letter is genuine, and it assumes that the facts mentioned in the letter are true, and it assumes that Rudolph was the first buyer, so it is by no means a sure thing. But a lot of us who lean (gingerly) toward the hoax theory stand by Occam's Razor, which points to a hoax being at least a feasable, and probably even likely solution. Rugg's analysis is just more circumstantial evidence, not proof, but every little bit weights the scale more.
Re:Ridiculous (Score:5, Insightful)
Here is what I know, partly assuming what you've said is accurate. Nobody knows when the manuscript was produced, the only evidence that indicates it's existance at a particular point may be suspect (although this is the case with much of the dates we've fixed for events in history and even the basis for several things we believe happened to the degree we call and teach them as facts). Yet this discovery claims at the time the manuscript was produced it was possible to produce fake meaningless gibberish that appears to have meaning.
Am I the only one who finds a problem with that in itself? How can you claim something was possible at the creation date when you don't know the creation date?
Next, giving that magically the date looked into did happen to coincide with the creation date that nobody knows. How exactly does a process being theoretically possible at a date get considered as evidence that is what was done in a particular instance?
Example, my house catches fire. Firefighters are unable to determine the source. The insurance company denies my claim on the grounds that the technology existed to rub two sticks together to generate heat and produce fire.
I wouldn't even call that circumstantial evidence. That isn't EVIDENCE at all. Hell if there were two sticks in the lawn right under the tree, then it would become the most ridiculous circumstantial evidence that should obviously be tossed aside. But it would be the sticks that are the evidence there, not the fact that it's possible to create fire by rubbing two sticks together and the technology existed at the time. However there isn't even that much here.
Your analogy is incomplete (Score:4, Informative)
Example, my house catches fire. Firefighters are unable to determine the source. The insurance company denies my claim on the grounds that the technology existed to rub two sticks together to generate heat and produce fire.
Of course, this is ridiculous. But there have been many who claimed that producing a hoax as convincing as the Voynich papers was virtually impossible. Rugg has shown that, at the earliest known date of "discovery," it was possible, and perhaps well worth doing for the price it fetched.
So, your analogy is incomplete. The insurance company's argument would have some relevance if you had previously been claiming that it was technologically impossible for you to light the fire. They just produced a counter-argument.
Coming back to the Voynich manuscript, it just means that the possibility of a hoax cannot be ruled out because of the effort required to produce it. Turns out it's not as hard as people thought.
Re:Your analogy is incomplete (Score:4, Informative)
There's no direct evidence that the document is forged. There's also no direct evidence that it's genuine, or even what "genuine" would mean. There are stories vaguely associating it with various interesting people, such as John Dee and Roger Bacon, but they're all pretty vague.
People have been studying this document for the better part of a century, because it's fascinating, enigmatic, and beautiful. (You can find some pictures of it at www.voynichinfo.com [voynichinfo.com]) We know a bit more than we did about what kinds of hypotheses are plausible and what kinds are not. For example: we can be pretty sure that it is not written in any natural language. We can also be pretty sure that it isn't just a simple substitution cipher. Finally, we can be pretty sure that it isn't a 20th century forgery: it has been given a rough date, it really does look like a manuscript from the 15th or 16th century, and it probably was once owned by Rudolf II. The Roger Bacon rumors are almost certainly false, because the manuscript doesn't appear to be that old. The John Dee rumors may be true.
At present the two most plausible guesses are that it is a real 15th or 16th century treatise on an occult subject, written in a code that has yet to be broken, or that it's a good imitation of an encoded occult text. If the latter, it was probably written specifically for the purpose of fooling Rudolf. It is known that he was fascinated by the occult (there's even an opera where that's a crucial plot point), and it is known that many of the astrologers and alchemists he patronized were quacks and that many of the texts he bought were forgeries.
What's interesting about this research isn't that it's a new argument against the possibility that the manuscript is genuine, but that it's a good counterargument. Until now, many people argued that the manuscript wasn't likely to be a forgery because the text followed a certain statistical property of natural languages (Zipf's law) that weren't known until the 20th century. Thus, the argument goes, it's unlikely to be a 16th century fake because a 16th century forger, inventing a fake code or a fake language, wouldn't have known to match this statistical distribution.
The reason this work is interesting is that it shows that this argument is invalid: there is a plausible method that a 16th century forger might have used that might have produced such a document. This doesn't show that it really is a 16th century forgery, it only shows that there's one fewer argument against that possibility than we once believed.
In the end, of course, we're unlikely to ever have decisive evidence that the manuscript is fake. Either someone will come up with a believable decryption (several people claim to have done it already; none of their claims have stood up), or people will keep trying and failing. The longer scholars bang their heads against the wall trying to get a translation, the less likely people will think it is that there really is one. Messy, but that's the way the world works. Sometimes you don't get to learn for sure whose guess is right.
Re:Ridiculous (Score:3, Insightful)
The manuscript was produced in a time when alchemy was the only science in town. Knowledge of herbal cures would've been a goldmine during that period, and studies to discover how to turn base metals into gold were the arms race of its day. Given that alchemist commonly encrypted their notes, this manuscript would've made a tempting purchase.
One overlooked thought is the amount of effort that went into encryption and decrypti
Re:Ridiculous (Score:3, Insightful)
Without intention of implying Nostradamus was or was not one of them. The same can be said of pretty much EVERY truely great mind in human history.
Those who believe being "normal" which is equivelent to "average" is a GOOD thing aren't likely to ever join their ranks
The pattern of nonsense (Score:4, Interesting)
Can you say "Kolmogorov complexity"? (Score:5, Interesting)
One definition of randomness, and one that seems quite reasonable is that a string is "random" if it cannot be compressed to smaller than it is, i.e. listing its characters itself is the most compact possible description. Formally, a string is random if there exists no algorithm generating the string whose description on some universal Turing machine is smaller than the string itself (this is the definition used in the field of Kolmogorov complexity [everything2.com]). A string of a billion digits making up Pi, for example, is not random by this definition, as one can easily write a short program [everything2.com], whose length would certainly be less than one billion characters, whose output is the digits of Pi. Think of it this way: the most general form of pattern matching device that we know of is a Turing machine, and if the best device you can construct to match that pattern is as complex or more complex than the pattern itself, then well, you have total randomness. Unfortunately, rigorously proving that a particular string is random by this very strong definition is extremely difficult, as you run into undecidability everywhere you turn.
This is the sort of stuff that real theoretical computer science is made of. For a very good overview of the theory of Kolmogorov Complexity and algorithmic information theory, Gregory Chaitin's home page [auckland.ac.nz] is a good starting point
To go back to the Voynich manuscript, if there is some sort of regularity that can be discerned from it, then perhaps a context-free or context-sensitive (or something in between) language may be found to characterize it. Once you have such a syntactic characterization, perhaps it might be possible to divine the semantics from context. The shape of the grammar that results may well prove whether the Manuscript is in fact a real language, a fabrication, an elaborate cipher, or just total gibberish.
Re:Can you say "Kolmogorov complexity"? (Score:3, Interesting)
As for finding a language given the string, it isn't hard to find a regular language containing the string, the hard part is to find the right la
so obvious (Score:4, Funny)
Had Mr Rugg just used rot13 he would've cracked the code long ago. Want Crypto? [politrix.org]
Re:so obvious (Score:2)
It's one thing to say something is a hoax... (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyone can say anything is a hoax but it takes scientific evidence - actual empirical data - to prove such a claim.
For example, people once believed that the Earth was flat (some people still do) but the circumnavigation of the globe by explorers such as Magellan, lunar exclipses, etc provide evidence to the contrary.
Saying that just because something could be a hoax then it is a hoax is just plain stupid. Like Fermat's Last Theorem, it may be many years before Voynich is proved to be geniune or accurate, but the absence of proof of the former doesn't provide proof of the latter. Remember, even though TLF has been proved, we still don't have the "simple proof" that Fermat himself discovered.
Saying that the manuscript is more likely to be a hoax than not just because computer scientists have theorised that it could have been faked in the 16th century is like a 25th century scholar saying that the Wright Brothers flight, the atomic bomb and the Apollo missions are more likely to be hoaxes than not just because they could have been faked with 20th century technology.
Re:It's one thing to say something is a hoax... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's because he almost certainly didn't discover one.
Fermat was known for making some pretty bone-headed mistakes. Also, in his future writings he posed challenges to prove FLT for the case of n=3 or n=4, but never for general n>2. If he had found a truly elegant proof of the general case, and believed it was true, why not pose the general challenge?
Re:It's one thing to say something is a hoax... (Score:3, Funny)
hmm... because the margins were too small to pose it in?
Re:It's one thing to say something is a hoax... (Score:3, Insightful)
However, the article offers speculation, not claims of proof/disproof.
I don't see anything unreasonable in the claim that the manuscript might be a hoax; reasonable observers will note that this is not actual proof.
In the meant
Re:It's one thing to say something is a hoax... (Score:2, Interesting)
You remind me of Stanislav Lem's classic book "Memoirs Found in a Bathtub." It's about a society that revolves around codebreaking. Lem makes huge plot points about short texts that are ambiguously decodable into dozens of other possible texts. They are never sure if the message really IS a code, or whether one of the decoded versions contains further codewords. But everyone is
Bible Code? (Score:4, Interesting)
The cat in the hat caught a rat and that was the end of that.
Notice the rhyming. Now translated into spanish (courtesy babelfish):
El gato en el sombrero cogio una rata y ese era el final de eso.
Now translated back into english:
The cat in the hat took a rat and that one was the end of that.
Okay, so notice in the original that the rhyming words appeared in positions 1, 4, 7, 9, and 14 (zero based). In the retranslation, the rhyming words appear in positions 1, 4, 7, 9 and 15. This disparity alone is enough to determine that the retranslation is not accurate.
Supposing that one writes in such a manner that there is a definitive pattern to their sentences and word choices, it is easy to determine the accuracy of a text after having gone through many translations. For a book such as the Bible, this was of paramount importance. I believe the original purpose of the "Bible codes" was to ensure that the meaning of scripture was not lost as it was passed from one generation to the next.
Consider for example, the poem. If a poem is incorrectly copied, it no longer rhymes, or the meter is disrupted. This simple mechanism not only ensures easy memorization, but provides a security against unintended alteration. In much the same manner, the "Bible codes" have provided scholars a way of discerning the accuracy of a copy of scripture. In fact, some of scripture is indeed poetic, further reinforcing the confidence in the original scriptures.
I find it somewhat interesting that lossless copying was available long before digital electronics were invented.
Re:Bible Code? (Score:4, Insightful)
An interesting conjecture, but you'd have to provide some sort of evidence to back it up. The "famous" bible codes are clearly nonsense - you can tweak the algorithm to extract just about anything from any text (see here [anu.edu.au] for an example). Do you have some alternative code that stands up better to scrutiny?
Also, at the time the books in the bible were written, accurate transcription wasn't considered nearly as important as it is today. The stories were part of an oral tradition anyway, and would have evolved in the telling before ever being committed to paper. Early scribes were aware of this and would not have thought twice about "correcting" parts of the story that didn't, to them, seem to be right.
Re:Bible Code? (Score:3, Interesting)
Sorry - you're wrong, particularly in terms of the writings that make up the Old Testament. The requirements for copying these texts were pretty stringent [bereanpublishers.co.nz]. Requirements 4, 6, and 7 are particularly interesting:
Re:It's one thing to say something is a hoax... (Score:2, Insightful)
RTFArticle. The Cardan Grille is a type of pseudorandom algorithm. You can't generate meaningful text out of pseudorandom algorithms. You might hit a few meaningful substrings eventually, but it will be almost pure gibberish.
Re:It's one thing to say something is a hoax... (Score:2)
Re:It's one thing to say something is a hoax... (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyone can say anything is a hoax but it takes scientific evidence - actual empirical data - to prove such a claim.
Anyone can claim anything, but the more outrageous the claim the more evidence they need to support it. Someone could
Re:It's one thing to say something is a hoax... (Score:5, Informative)
No. It is the proponents of the idea that the book is genuine's job to prove that it is indeed that. One doesn't need to prove that something is a hoax if it is, Occam's Razor does that job. What explanation is contains the fewest ubstantiated assumptions: That something was written a language nobody knows, containing valuable information nobody has any idea about, or that it was produced using a simple encryption technique to fool somebody to pay loads of shiny ducats?
I find it amazing that some people still hold this myth as true! What kind of history education have you had!?!
Look, no scientist have never claimed the earth was flat. For one thing, in every other culture than the western, it has never been claimed otherwise ("they even knew the earth was spherical"), but some has got the weird notion that Columbus had to argue that the earth wasn't flat.
He didn't. The moron had the wrong numbers, and would have gotten killed if America didn't happen to be there.
Allready the pupils of Thales claimed their master knew the earth was round. Erastostenes, measured the circumference of the earth with an error of 3%! The true circumference of the earth was known to the greeks in antiquity! Plato and his pupil Aristotle himself knew many arguments for the spherical shape of the earth, and why is this important? Because though some Christian scholars around 300 AD didn't like the idea of a spherical earth, St. Augustin adopted much of Plato's philosophy and made it an important part of christianity in the same century, and they adopted the ideas of a spherical earth as well. Through Augustin, every leading authority accepted the idea of a spherical earth.
Eventually, Erastostenes numbers was also accepted , but Columbus didn't like them, because it meant that going the other way to India was infeasible. So, he used some other numbers, and he used Marco Polo's exaggerated estimates of the distance he had travelled, and so he made it quite feasible. But it wasn't, he was wrong.
Columbus thought the distance to Asia was 4000 km, his contemporary scientists 16000 km, the real distance is 23000 km, while Columbus eventually travelled 6500 km.
So, why is this important? Because people who hold this belief often have many other misunderstandings about science. Indeed, you can't prove that the book is a hoax, but for that reason, the burden of the proof rests with the proponents of the idea that it is genuine. Who, of course, might cling to the idea that it is, long after the world has moved on to greener pastures. That's how it usually works anyway.
Indeed mod parent up. (Score:2)
Re:It's one thing to say something is a hoax... (Score:4, Informative)
No, to you. Occam's Razor is a heuristic for selecting hypotheses to test. It doesn't relieve you of the burden of proof just because your burden is heavier. You definitely do need to prove that "X is false", if that is the hypothesis you selected based on whatever heuristics you choose.
Voynich is patently written in an unknown code (i.e., language): that's not an assumption, it's a given for both hypotheses. The first hypothesis (you used the non-synonim "unsubstantiated assumption") is that Voynich has high information content in the algorithmic sense. The second hypothesis is that Voynich has low information content, again in the algorithmic sense. Considerations of value, motive, etcetera are irrelevant to this analysis although they might be of heuristic value for selecting hypotheses, but not for application of Occam's Razor (which is another heuristic).
To sum it up, you still have the burden of proof, and you can't use heuristics for selecting heuristics.
Re:Hi (Score:2)
Did you read any of the article? Do you have any capacity for reasoned thought?
Well, I read the article. In full. That's how I know the text is from the 16th century and mentioned it as being so in my post. Did you read any of my post? Do you have any capacity for reasoned thought?
No? Didn't think so.
Isn't it funny how the idiots who can't find the time to properly debate opinions that they disagree with can f
Looks like things haven't changed in 500 years! (Score:2, Funny)
Google found me this (Score:5, Informative)
In case you're wondering what it looks like
http://www.voynich.nu/ [voynich.nu]
Here is a better one. (Score:4, Informative)
It has a slow load due to java applets though.
Cryptonomicom has this (Score:4, Interesting)
There is a portion of Cryptonomicom by Neal Stephenson where a real book of coded intercepts is replaced by random number strings encrypted with a fairly simple scheme.
Does anyone know if this book is a seed for Stephenson's story? He draws an awful lot of information from the history of computing for his stories.
Re:Cryptonomicom has this (Score:3, Interesting)
Was the Cryptonomicom based on the Necronomicon ? (Score:3, Interesting)
I have no idea if Stephanson knew this, but given the similarity of names, I would suspect so.
More details can be found here [necfiles.org].
Anyone else get the feeling... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Anyone else get the feeling... (Score:2)
Yes, I do, and this isn't the first time I've felt this way. I've thought the same thing when I hear the term "junk DNA."
This "book" was authored in antiquity, through great effort and expense. It represents lost knowledge. If it is ever understood I doubt it will actually matter; likely it's a book on botany as it was understood in it's time, replete with mysticism, fables and bad ideas, while managing to
A Hoax? To What End? (Score:5, Informative)
I've studied the Voynich manuscript before, and the possibility of a hoax seems just as unlikely as many of the theories that have been floating about. Yes, the language of the Voynich manuscript could be an elaborate hoax, but Rugg's analysis only proves what is already widely known.
The problem of creating such an elaborate hoax is that even Rugg's theory doesn't explain all the features of the Voynich manuscript. Furthermore, it seems unlikely that a sixteenth-century forger would go to the trouble of creating something that would have all the qualities of a real language and would include techniques that would deliberately resemble an actual document when viewed with analytical techniques that wouldn't be developed later. Occam's Razor makes it seem more likely that there some kind of language operating in the manuscript than a random system of patterns. Then again, there's no real way of knowing.
There are some images of the text of the Voynich Manuscript available here [voynichinfo.com]. Analysis of the text and the illustrations support the theory that the manuscript has defined sections on astrology, herbal medicine, and other subjects. There have been some serious and some rediculous theories about the manuscript from the intriguing notion that the Voynich text is mathematically similar to East Asian languages [unicamp.br] like Chinese or Vietnamese, or that the Voynich manuscript is written in an ancient form of Ukrainian. (I've read the supposed translation of it from the Ukrainian, and it hardly makes sense given that the manuscript's illustations don't match the text of the supposed translation.)
In the meantime, this site offers more information on modern translation efforts [bham.ac.uk] including a font for the Voynich script. (Which would make a lovely way of annoying co-workers by switching their default system font to Voynich text...)
Burden on proof ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Indeed right now it isn't prooved at all that this manuscript has any meaning (encrypted or not) and a researcher prooved that you can reproduce most of the feature of the manuscript by using an encryption technic born a few year earlier. Furthermore the person selling it to the first known possessor was a forger. Yes not all feature are repdroduced. But this is a step forward.
The burden of proof is with you and "Then again, there's no real way of knowing." isn't an answer. At least none a scientific and a person interresed into knowing moer hold for enough. And, yes "Voynich manuscript. Furthermore, it seems unlikely that a sixteenth-century forger would go to the trouble of creating something that would have all the qualities of a real language and would include techniques that would deliberately resemble" Well I have news for you. 3.5 Kilogram gold (a prince wealth for the time) make it more likely than you wish to hold it.
You might have included a lot of link making people see your post as informative, but frankly it isn't especially your dubious use of Occam's Razor (The explanation needing the LESS number of new entity is the most probable). Sorry but to purport that the manuscript hold meaning is having one unknown new entity (from where that language come ?) more than purporting that using the clever trick aforementionned (available at that time) which hold no unknown new entity.
My final point is, Occam's razor only say you what is the most likely explanation. NOT WHAT IS THE CORRECT ONE.
Author's Page (Score:5, Informative)
From the article... (Score:3, Funny)
It's called a Xerox machine man.
repeats (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:repeats (Score:2)
Re:repeats (Score:4, Interesting)
On the other hand, this certainly could be a hoax. After all, the author was familiar with cryptographic methods and was paid an enormous amount of money for the manuscript. The real truth could certainly be either hoax or reality - there simply aren't enough facts available to decide right now, despite the huge amount of work put into the manuscript by many talented amateur cryptographers.
Re:repeats (Score:3, Insightful)
Those were random examples. In Indonesian, EVERY noun is doubled to pluralise. So this is very common feature indeed. In English, no, we don't duplicate so much.
As far as the main article goes, though, I'd vote for it being a hoax.
Re:repeats (Score:2)
Re:repeats (Score:2)
Could be if you happened to use "men" in every sentence, as it's certainly possible to do in English.
Anyway; I wasn't arguing that this language was Indonesian, and we weren't given any figures in the brief article. I simply wanted to point out that frequent duplication is part of at least some natural languages, and so is not much of an indicator of whether it's real.
Re:repeats (Score:2)
Of course Latin was written and spoken for centruries, and in many different territories so there is some variation to this; nevertheless in most Classical texts you'll get to read when you start to study Latin, "and", "is", "a" and "the" will hardly make an appearance.
Re:repeats (Score:2)
Codebreak this! (Score:2, Funny)
Re:repeats (Score:2)
Repetition, especially thrice, is actually very common at least in Ancient Egyptian language, and many modern occult texts are based on egyptian mysticism. It is puzzling that the writers don't know that.
IANAEIAE, but three repetitions typically refer to plural form (such as ntrw, gods, usually depicted as three "axes" when ntr, god, is usually depict
WSOP (Score:2)
'Why Jimmy, that's very profound! What does it mean?'
'Well, Terry, I'm fucked if I know!'
(From Alan Parker's The Commitments)
Wait! I got it! (Score:2, Funny)
YHBT YHL HAND
Interesting problem. (Score:5, Interesting)
Those who read the article can take note of an interesting challenge: though Rugg has shown that it is possible to generate a high quality hoax using a Cardan grille, proving it to be a hoax may require producing a character grid that will actually generate large portions of the text. My question is, could that be done with a genetic algorithm, and are any Slashdotters up to the task?
Also, a few comments about formal analysis. Notice that if you took some arbitrary text, typeset it in a fixed-width font to force the characters into columns, and then skimmed it with a grille in order to generate a new text, you would automatically preserve such basic statistics as character frequency, including spaces and also punctuation if you used them in your grid. (Depending on how you applied the grille, you could actually be generating a simple permutation of the original text.) However, you would disrupt all the within-word correlations.
For example, in compound words derived from Latin there is a familiar pattern where ad C* ==> aCC* (where C is some arbitrary consonant), but that pattern would be completely obscured if the characters were read off a diagonal grille as shown in the photograph. You would still get the increased frequency for C, but not the common aCC pattern.
More subtly, there are some well known universals of syllable structure in natural languages, but those would be scrambled just as the aCC would be. You would have the right proportions of consonants and vowels, but not a realistic distribution within words.
Likewise, prefixes and suffixes would be scrambled. If it is a hoax generated by a Cardan grille, it should not have prefix/suffix patterns that occur commonly in many languages. (Ditto for suffixal inflections.) In fact, the letters appearing at the beginnings and ends of words should be a random sampling from the frequency distribution of letters in the whole text; this may be the easiest metric to check.
Also, by using spaces as characters in your grid you'd get the right proportion of spaces, and therefore the right average word length, but you would obscure any patterns in word length. Someone has already linked to studies of the word lengths in the manuscripts, but those assumed that the distribution of Latin word lengths word lengths would be preserved. However, only the average would be preserved. I suspect the distribution would be converted to a gaussian. Anyone got time for the experiment? (Notice that you may generate extra spaces with the grille, depending on how you use it. For example, what do you do when your grille starts running off the bottom of the page in your source text? Or, if your grille has 10 windows, do you transcribe to the first space and then move the grille, or do you transcribe everything in the grille and insert a "virtual" space for position 11? It looks to me like you might be able to generate the document's actual "word" lengths from Latin, given only some very basic assumptions.)
Re: Interesting problem. (Score:4, Interesting)
> In fact, the letters appearing at the beginnings and ends of words should be a random sampling from the frequency distribution of letters in the whole text; this may be the easiest metric to check.
Actually, the distribution of initial letters might be preserved, or at least mostly preserved. If the source text is written so that lines always begin with a new word, and the grille is always aligned with the start of a line, then what you read out of the grille will preserve the frequencies of word-initial letters. But if you read more than one "word" out of the grille before moving it, you will get a mixture of the true word-initial distribution plus the distribution of all the letters in the document. And if you don't always align the grille to the start of a line, all bets are off.
Off hand, I don't see any way that the distribution of word-final letters would be preserved. The first thing I would do to detect a hoax is compare that distribution to the distribution of all the letters in the document. If they are the same, then I would suspect the use of a grille or some other randomizer.
Repeats? (Score:3, Interesting)
What about Chines? From the little that I've learned, they often repeat a word for emphasis - e.g., Xie Xie meaning thank you.
Codex Seraphinanus (Score:2)
There are only around 600 copies of the book, but I got a chance to see it recently via the marvelous university-interlibrary loan system. Worth a look!
Protocols of Zion (Score:2)
You can't permenantly do that (Score:3, Funny)
It's ancient and indecipherable! (Score:3, Interesting)
Years ago I had a coworker who would blather on about the Urantia book and its 'answers'... but then he was an old stoner too.
Arlet and the rec.puzzles archive (Score:3, Interesting)
http://rec-puzzles.org/new/sol.pl/cryptology/Vo
Mmm, strangeness.
What we really secretly want it to be is... (Score:2)
It's generated by Zeta functions (Score:2)
Namshub of Enki (Score:2)
Repetitions in the Text (Score:3, Funny)
Source: http://www.keele.ac.uk/depts/cs/staff/g.rugg/voyn
It is very, very, very unlikely that common words would be repeated again and again and again unless someone really, really, really wanted to.
More information about Voynich (Score:4, Informative)
Some other good links for Voynich information:
Elonka :)
Surprised this didn't come up (Score:3, Interesting)
Levitov provides methodology for extracting the linguistic model that the book encodes. Many examples and translations are provided, and there is plenty of work for the reader to do if he wants to prove the system to himself.
Levitov proposes that his solution reveals a manual of heretical text regarding the ease and assistance of the mortally ill into death -- euthenasia, basically. To my knowledge, his work has not been discredited, only ignored.
For the definitive hoax-type artificial reality book, check out the amazing Codex Seraphinianus [io.com].
Re:There have been many meaningless books... (Score:3)
Its an unknown language or an unseen encryption scheme. This new theory is that it's neither, just cleverly crafted to appear that way. An interesting read...
Re:think this is a sign....... (Score:2)
Re:Not the only book of this kind (Score:2, Redundant)
This one is slightly different because different people take different meanings from it, but they all tend to be rather weird.
Re:Not the only book of this kind (Score:2)
KFG
Re:More information (Score:3, Informative)
You missed it, obviously (Score:2)
She didn't visit her dead father in space. She was visitied by an alien that used her father's image to keep her calm and rational. What bugs me about people missing this point is that it is explicitly explained right in that very scene!