Voynich manuscript
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript
Scientists have harnessed the power of artificial
intelligence to unlock the secrets of an ancient
manuscript that has baffled experts.
Discovered in the 19th century, the Voynich manuscript
uses “alien” characters that have long puzzled crypto-
graphers and historians. Now, however, computing
scientists at the University of Alberta say they are
decoding the mysterious 15th-century text.
Computing science professor Greg Kondrak and graduate
student Bradley Hauer applied artificial intelligence to
find ambiguities in the text’s human language.
The first stage of the research was working out the
manuscript’s language. The experts used 400 different
language translations from the “Universal Declaration of
Human Rights” to identify the language used in the text.
Initially, it seemed like the text was written in Arabic,
but the researcher’s algorithms revealed that the manu-
script is written in Hebrew.
“That was surprising,” said Kondrak, in a statement.
“And just saying ‘this is Hebrew’ is the first step. The
next step is how do we decipher it.”
Kondrak and Hauer worked out that Voynich manuscript was
created using “alphagrams” that use one phrase to define
another so built an algorithm to unscramble the text. “It
turned out that over 80 percent of the words were in a
Hebrew dictionary, but we didn’t know if they made sense
together,” said Kondrak.
The initial part of the text was then run through Google
Translate. “It came up with a sentence that is grammatical
and you can interpret it,” Kondrak explained.
The sentence was: “She made recommendations to the priest,
man of the house and me and people.”
The full meaning of the text will need the involvement of
historians of ancient Hebrew. The vellum, or animal skin, on
which the codex is written has been dated to the early 15th
century.
The research study is published in Volume 4 of Transactions
of the Association for Computational Linguistics.
There have been multiple attempts to decode the Voynich
manuscript. In 2014, for example, researchers argued that the
illustrations of plants in the manuscript could help decode the
text’s strange characters. In 2011, a self-proclaimed “prophet
of God” claimed that he had decoded the book.
