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Show HN: I modeled the Voynich Manuscript with SBERT to test for structure

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Re: Show HN: I modeled the Voynich Manuscript with SBERT to test for structure

#81

Post by edoceo »

quantadev wrote: post #65
brig90 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a really interesting question — and one I’ve been circling in the back of my head, honestly. I’m not a cryptographer, so I can’t speak to how feasible a brute-force approach is at scale, but the idea of mapping each Voynich “word” to a real word in another language and optimizing for coherence definitely lines up with some of the more experimental approaches people have tried. The challenge (as I understand it…

Like I said in another post (sorry for repeating) since this was during 1500s, the main thing people would've been encrypting back then was biblical text (or any other religion). Maybe a version of scripture that had been "rejected" by some King, and was illegal to reproduce? Take the best radiocarbon dating, figure out who was King back then, and if they 'sanctioned' any biblical translations, and then go to the ver…

Is this grey cause it talks about religion? That stuff was bigger in 1500 than 2000, from that lense as religious text seems a reasonable track to follow.

Re: Show HN: I modeled the Voynich Manuscript with SBERT to test for structure

#82

Post by edoceo »

andoando wrote: post #23
lolinder wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Statistical analyses such as this one consistently find patterns that are consistent with a proper language and would be unlikely to have emerged from someone who was just putting gibberish on the page. To get the kinds of patterns these turn up someone would have had to go a large part of the way towards building a full constructed language, which is interesting in its own right.

Could still be gibberish. Shud less kee chicken souls do be gooby good? Mus hess to my rooby roo!

This reads like bayou-louisanian or possibly Ozark (source: family)

Re: Show HN: I modeled the Voynich Manuscript with SBERT to test for structure

#83

Post by quantadev »

edoceo wrote: post #81
quantadev wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like I said in another post (sorry for repeating) since this was during 1500s, the main thing people would've been encrypting back then was biblical text (or any other religion). Maybe a version of scripture that had been "rejected" by some King, and was illegal to reproduce? Take the best radiocarbon dating, figure out who was King back then, and if they 'sanctioned' any biblical translations, and then go to the ver…

Is this grey cause it talks about religion? That stuff was bigger in 1500 than 2000, from that lense as religious text seems a reasonable track to follow.

Other than war plans, religious text was pretty much the only thing in the 1500s that would have been encrypted. However war plans would be very unlikely to be disguised as a botany book, for all kinds of reasons. War plans are temporary, not something you'd dedicate that level of artistic effort and permanence to.

Re: Show HN: I modeled the Voynich Manuscript with SBERT to test for structure

#85

Post by renhanxue »

GolfPopper wrote: post #80
us-merul wrote: post #13

I’ve found this to be one of the most interesting hypotheses: http://voynichproject.org/ The author made an assumption that Voynichese is a Germanic language, and it looks like he was able to make some progress with it. I’ve also come across accounts that it might be an Uralic or Finno-Ugric language. I think your approach is great, and I wonder if tweaking it for specific language families could go even further.

Edward Kelly[1] was in the right place at the right time, and I recall reading many years ago (though I cannot now find the source) some evidence that he was familiar with the Cardan grille[2], which was sufficient to convince me that he was mostly likely the author, and that the book was intended as a hoax or fraud. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Kelley 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardan_grille

These days the manuscript is quite conclusively dated to the first half of the 15th century; the parchment it's written on is definitely from that period, since it's been carbon dated to 1404–1438 with 95% confidence. The general style is also consistent with that dating. For example, medievalist Lisa Fagin Davis writes in a recent paper: "[t]he humanistic tendencies of the glyphset, the color palette, and style of the illustrations suggest an origin in the early fifteenth century" [0].

Edward Kelly was born over a hundred years later, so him "being at the right time" seems to be a bit of a stretch.

[0]: https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3313/keynote2.pdf

Re: Show HN: I modeled the Voynich Manuscript with SBERT to test for structure

#86

Post by buildsjets »

neom wrote: post #33
InsideOutSanta wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> would be unlikely to have emerged from someone who was just putting gibberish on the page People often assert this, but I'm unsure of any evidence. If I wrote a manuscript in a pretend language, I would expect it to end up with language-like patterns, some automatically and some intentionally. Humans aren't random number generators, and they aren't stupid. Therefore, the implicit claim that a human could not create…

For some reason your comment reminds me of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisencolinensinainciusol - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fU-wH8SrFro

Japanese psychedelic band Kikagaku Moyo writes lyrics that are basically Japanese baby talk / babble.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=idfOZFdTM-8&t=2m39s

https://genius.com/Kikagaku-moyo-dripping-sun-lyrics

Re: Show HN: I modeled the Voynich Manuscript with SBERT to test for structure

#87

Post by brig90 »

bdbenton5255 wrote: post #84

Another great natural mystery that machine learning could tackle is earthquake prediction. Sure you could find some patterns modeling historical data.

Totally — I love that kind of sideways thinking. Earthquake prediction feels like one of those massive, noisy systems where patterns might exist, but they’re buried deep in complexity. I’ll admit, I know absolutely nothing about seismology, so I have no idea how realistic that kind of modelling would be — but yeah, it feels like one of those domains where structure might be hiding in what looks like chaos.

Appreciate the nudge — always fascinating to see where people take this kind of thinking.

Re: Show HN: I modeled the Voynich Manuscript with SBERT to test for structure

#88

Post by emmelaich »

renhanxue wrote: post #85
GolfPopper wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edward Kelly[1] was in the right place at the right time, and I recall reading many years ago (though I cannot now find the source) some evidence that he was familiar with the Cardan grille[2], which was sufficient to convince me that he was mostly likely the author, and that the book was intended as a hoax or fraud. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Kelley 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardan_grille

These days the manuscript is quite conclusively dated to the first half of the 15th century; the parchment it's written on is definitely from that period, since it's been carbon dated to 1404–1438 with 95% confidence. The general style is also consistent with that dating. For example, medievalist Lisa Fagin Davis writes in a recent paper: "[t]he humanistic tendencies of the glyphset, the color palette, and style of t…

I think it's entirely possible the inks are much later. Possibly Kelly erased whatever was on the parchment previously. In fact the drawings might have made liberal use of the original, just to hide that fact.

Which is worse actually. Kelly may have semi-erased an existing valuable manuscript.

Re: Show HN: I modeled the Voynich Manuscript with SBERT to test for structure

#89

Post by renhanxue »

emmelaich wrote: post #88
renhanxue wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These days the manuscript is quite conclusively dated to the first half of the 15th century; the parchment it's written on is definitely from that period, since it's been carbon dated to 1404–1438 with 95% confidence. The general style is also consistent with that dating. For example, medievalist Lisa Fagin Davis writes in a recent paper: "[t]he humanistic tendencies of the glyphset, the color palette, and style of t…

I think it's entirely possible the inks are much later. Possibly Kelly erased whatever was on the parchment previously. In fact the drawings might have made liberal use of the original, just to hide that fact. Which is worse actually. Kelly may have semi-erased an existing valuable manuscript.

The hypothesis that the manuscript is a palimpsest (that is, written on an old parchment that was scraped clean of a previous text; such recycling was common because parchment was expensive) has been thoroughly rejected. That sort of thing is detectable, in fact there's an entire field of research dedicated to recovering lost texts from palimpsests, but the Voynich manuscript shows absolutely no signs of that.
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