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Show HN: I modeled the Voynich Manuscript with SBERT to test for structure
71–80 of 142 posts
Re: Show HN: I modeled the Voynich Manuscript with SBERT to test for structure
#72Wasn't it already deciphered, though? https://www.researchgate.net/publication/368991190_The_Voyni...
Most agree that this is not a real solution. Many of the pages translate to nonsense using that scheme, and some of the figures included in the paper don't actually come from the Voynich manuscript in the first place. For more info, see https://www.voynich.ninja/thread-3940-post-53738.html#pid537...
Check out Rainer Hannig's instructions:
Re: Show HN: I modeled the Voynich Manuscript with SBERT to test for structure
#73How expensive is a "brute force" approach to decode it? I mean, how about mapping each unknown word by a known word in a known language and improve this mapping until a 'high score' is reached?
This seems to assume that a 1:1 mapping between words exists, but I don't think that's true for languages in general. Compound words, for example, won't map cleanly that way. Not to mention deeper semantic differences between languages due to differences in culture.
Re: Show HN: I modeled the Voynich Manuscript with SBERT to test for structure
#74[flagged]
This doesn’t burst my bubble at all — if anything, it’s great to hear that others have been able to make meaningful progress using different methods. I wasn’t trying to crack the manuscript or stake a claim on the origin; this project was more about exploring how modern tools like NLP and clustering could model structure in unknown languages.
My main goal was to learn and see if the manuscript behaved like a real language, not necessarily to translate it. Appreciate the link — I’ll check it out (once I get my German up to speed!).
Re: Show HN: I modeled the Voynich Manuscript with SBERT to test for structure
#75I see that you're looking for clusters within PCA projections -- You should look for deeper structure with hot new dimensional reduction algorithms, like PaCMAP or LocalMAP! I've been working on a project related to a sensemaking tool called Pol.is [1], but reprojecting its wiki survey data with these new algorithms instead of PCA, and it's amazing what new insight it uncovers with these new algorithms! https://patco…
I’ve had much better luck with umap than PCA and t-sne for reducing embeddings.
PaCMAP (and its descendant localmap) are comparable to t-sne at preserving both local and global structure (but without messing much with finicky hyperparameters)
Re: Show HN: I modeled the Voynich Manuscript with SBERT to test for structure
#76Earlier 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
And let’s not forget “Ken Lee”
Re: Show HN: I modeled the Voynich Manuscript with SBERT to test for structure
#77(I know nothing about NLP) Does it make sense to check the process with a control group? E.g. if we ask a human to write something that resembles a language but isn’t, then conduct this process (remove suffixes, attempt grouping, etc), are we likely to get similar results?
yes exactly, why did we not simply ask 100 people to write voynich manuscripts and then train on that dataset
Re: Show HN: I modeled the Voynich Manuscript with SBERT to test for structure
#78I thought it was old turkish?
Re: Show HN: I modeled the Voynich Manuscript with SBERT to test for structure
#79I thought it was old turkish? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6keMgLmFEk&t=1s
English translation of the manuscript is timestamped below:
Re: Show HN: I modeled the Voynich Manuscript with SBERT to test for structure
#80I’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.