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The Mystery of the Voynich Manuscript

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Re: The Mystery of the Voynich Manuscript

#11

Post by hobs »

rustynails wrote: post #10

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.

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.

Re: The Mystery of the Voynich Manuscript

#12

Post by contingencies »

indubitably wrote: post #6
ferdo wrote: post #3

Obligatory link to an online copy. It's well worth the browse: http://archive.org/details/TheVoynichManuscript

http://www.jasondavies.com/voynich/

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

Re: The Mystery of the Voynich Manuscript

#13

Post by 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?

Re: The Mystery of the Voynich Manuscript

#15

Post by ianterrell »

hobs wrote: post #11
rustynails wrote: post #10

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.

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.

Re: The Mystery of the Voynich Manuscript

#16

Post by codezero »

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.

Re: The Mystery of the Voynich Manuscript

#17

Post by ChuckMcM »

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.

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).

Re: The Mystery of the Voynich Manuscript

#18

Post by bgroins »

coldcode wrote: post #14

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.

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.

Re: The Mystery of the Voynich Manuscript

#19

Post by shmerl »

ferdo wrote: post #3

Obligatory link to an online copy. It's well worth the browse: http://archive.org/details/TheVoynichManuscript

Direct Djvu link: http://ia700305.us.archive.org/6/items/TheVoynichManuscript/...

They use some Java wrapper which is pointless if you have a native Djvu plugin.

Re: The Mystery of the Voynich Manuscript

#20

Post by macspoofing »

coldcode wrote: post #14

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.

>Aliens are as likely an explanation as anything found so far.

That's quite the logical leap you took there. I think it's far far more likely that a human wrote this document.

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