

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

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xk_id
I 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.).

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acqq
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?

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DanBC
> why searching for some more complicated explanation?

But _why_ generate all that text using a cardan grille?

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acqq
To sell a book as something extraordinary.

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spiritplumber
Obligatory link to the solution to the mystery:
[http://xkcd.com/593/](http://xkcd.com/593/)

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

[http://archive.org/details/TheVoynichManuscript](http://archive.org/details/TheVoynichManuscript)

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indubitably
[http://www.jasondavies.com/voynich/](http://www.jasondavies.com/voynich/)

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

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ChuckMcM
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?

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codezero
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.

~~~
ChuckMcM
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).

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kragen
> 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.

But consider: > The first person said to have owned the manuscript was the
Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, who reportedly was intrigued enough to buy it
from its previous owner for six hundred ducats, around ninety thousand dollars
in today’s money. (According to the manuscript’s radiocarbon dating, the book
was already nearly two centuries old at the time of his purchase.)

Supposing it's random — perhaps the person who made it originally, two hundred
years earlier, hoped to charge a similar price from either a gullible patron
like Rudolf, or someone who hoped to find a greater fool like Rudolf?

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ChuckMcM
That is a very good point, if the author knew that there was a demand for
mysterious documents they may have created one to fill that demand.

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codezero
Tis is very likely. I bought a map of the US for my dad (he collects old maps)
which depicts California as an island some 10-15 years after they were sure it
wasn't an island. It turns out that novelty maps were more in demand than real
maps.

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rustynails
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.

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hobs
Exactly 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.

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ianterrell
> _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
Oh reaaally. Interesting, I will read up because I had heard the exact
opposite, and clearly my source is wrong! (my brain)

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zw123456
Oblogatory (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)

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shawn-butler
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.

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film42
How much is the Voynich Manuscript currently worth?

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coldcode
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.

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bgroins
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.

