![]() So they handed off the opening sentence to a colleague who was a native Hebrew speaker. Next, they needed to figure out the code it was in. Now, supposedly, the researchers had a language. The algorithm found that 80 percent of the encoded words appeared to be written in Hebrew. Once the AI turned up a 97 percent success rate in matching anagrams to modern words, the researchers fed text from the first ten pages of the Voynich Manuscript into it. (For example, "manuscript" would be alphagramized as "acimnprstu.") So, they trained an algorithm to decipher 380 different-language versions of the UN " Universal Declaration of Human Rights." Originally, the scientists suspected the manuscript to be made out of a type of vowel-less alphagram, or an anagram in which letters in a word are rewritten alphabetically. They approached the text armed with a computer program of their own design. The study authors write that the Voynich Manuscript is "the most challenging type of a decipherment problem," since we don't know its secret code but-perhaps more importantly-don't know what language it's in, either. From there, it eventually traded hands to a Bohemian pharmacist. In the late 16th century, a German emperor purchased the manuscript from an English astrologer for 600 Venetian ducats, thinking it was a work of medieval friar Roger Bacon. Historical records show the text has fallen into the hands of alchemists and emperors alike. It's possible the manuscript is of magical or scientific nature. He tried to interest people in translating it, but alas, none have succeeded.ĭo we have any idea what the manuscript might be about?īased on the illustrations, scholars believe the book is divided into six sections: herbal, astronomical, biological, cosmological, pharmaceutical, and recipes. It's named for Wilfrid Michael Voynich, the Polish book dealer who purchased it from a Jesuit library in Italy in 1912. The manuscript has been housed at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University since 1969. One particularly curious passage shows dozens of naked women bathing in pools of interconnected green liquid. The renderings show doodles of castles and dragons along with diagrams of plants, planets, naked figures, and astronomical symbols, all detailed in green, brown, yellow, blue, and red ink. There are gaps in the page numbers and evidence that it could have been rebound at some point, so the order of the pages today may be different than they were when the book was published.Īn elegant, looping script of 25 to 30 characters runs from left to right in short paragraphs down the pages, interspersed with detailed illustrations. It doesn't include an index but likely had foldouts that have long since gone missing. ![]() Written in Central Europe in the 15th century, the book is slightly larger than a modern paperback and contains 246 fragile pages of bound vellum, or script-ready animal skin. The Voynich Manuscript is likely what cryptologists call a cipher, or a coded pattern of letters. In a study published in the journal Transactions of the Association of Computational Linguistics, computing scientists from the University of Alberta used an algorithm to try to decode parts of the Voynich Manuscript, a medieval book written in an undecipherable code with an unknown language.īut other scholars are skeptical, and the manuscript remains a document very much shrouded in mystery. A pair of Canadian codebreakers may have deciphered a 600-year-old book that has been baffling cryptologists for centuries.
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