Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Mystery of the Voynich Manuscript

newyorker.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 30 posts

Re: The Mystery of the Voynich Manuscript

#21

Post by codezero »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #17
codezero wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 s…

I 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.

Re: The Mystery of the Voynich Manuscript

#22

Post by kragen »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #17
codezero wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 s…

> 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?

Re: The Mystery of the Voynich Manuscript

#23

Post by acqq »

xk_id wrote: post #2

I found this scholarly article to be a concise summary of many interesting points: http://www.isi.edu/natural-language/people/voynich-11.pdf ("What we know about the Voynich manuscript" by Reddy S. and Knight K.).

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?

Re: The Mystery of the Voynich Manuscript

#24

Post by tiatia »

codezero wrote: post #16
ChuckMcM wrote: post #13

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?

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.

Wrong!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript#Exotic_natur...

Re: The Mystery of the Voynich Manuscript

#26

Post by DanBC »

acqq wrote: post #23
xk_id wrote: post #2

I found this scholarly article to be a concise summary of many interesting points: http://www.isi.edu/natural-language/people/voynich-11.pdf ("What we know about the Voynich manuscript" by Reddy S. and Knight K.).

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 searchi…

> why searching for some more complicated explanation?

But why generate all that text using a cardan grille?

Re: The Mystery of the Voynich Manuscript

#27

Post by ChuckMcM »

kragen wrote: post #22
ChuckMcM wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

> 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…

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.

Re: The Mystery of the Voynich Manuscript

#28

Post by acqq »

DanBC wrote: post #26
acqq wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 searchi…

> why searching for some more complicated explanation? But why generate all that text using a cardan grille?

To sell a book as something extraordinary.

Re: The Mystery of the Voynich Manuscript

#29

Post by codezero »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #27
kragen wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

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.

Re: The Mystery of the Voynich Manuscript

#30

Post by hobs »

ianterrell wrote: post #15
hobs wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly the challenge. I am pretty sure that I read they took 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.

> 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 , linked in another comment.

Oh reaaally. Interesting, I will read up because I had heard the exact opposite, and clearly my source is wrong! (my brain)
Post reply on HN