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“They are saying it looks more like Hebrew than other languages,” he said. Speaking to the Times of Israel, Hebrew-speaking data scientist Shlomo Argamon offered some excoriating feedback. To a layperson, it might sound plausible-but already, Voynich experts and computer scientists alike are rolling their eyes at these recent efforts. “It’s a kind of strange sentence to start a manuscript,” Kondrak said, “but it definitely makes sense.” Their work has been published in the journal Transactions of the Association of Computational Linguistics. According to all of these algorithms, the first sentence reads: “She made recommendations to the priest, man of the house and me and people.” After correcting a few funky spelling mistakes, that approach gave them a halfway decent first sentence, Kondrak said, which was interpretable and grammatical. Hebrew scholars failed to come to the fore, so the scientists turned to a digital bastion of international understanding: Google Translate. The challenge, however, was in trying to find out whether they made sense together. Illustrations show leaves, roots, and other flora. “It turned out that over 80 percent of the words were in a Hebrew dictionary,” said Kondrak. These assumptions made, they tried to come up with an algorithm to decipher this scrambled Hebrew text, to striking effect. (In standard alphagrams, the letters in a word are placed in alphabetical order-the alphagram of “alphagram,” for example, is “aaaghlpmr.”) Vowels also seemed to have been dropped.
#Voynich manuscript solved code
The next step is how do we decipher it.” The scientists think the code used in the manuscript might have been created using alphagrams. “And just saying ‘this is Hebrew’ is the first step. “That was surprising,” Kondrak said, in a statement. Instead, the algorithms suggested an unexpected alternative: It looked to the computer like Hebrew.
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In the past, people have suggested everything from Latin to gibberish Kondrak and Hauer thought it might be Arabic. With graduate student Bradley Hauer, Kondrak used 380 translations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to systematically identify what the language used in the text might be. There are two problems with this notoriously difficult puzzle-it’s written in code, and no one knows what language that code enciphers. In the past, he had worked on natural language processing, and was keen to apply some of the same techniques to the text. A professor of computer science, he came across the ancient mystery through the artificial intelligence community. Grzegorz Kondrak is almost the opposite of a medievalist. It’s a predictably vexing development to medievalists and other experts.
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Where humans have failed, artificial intelligence is attempting to pick up the slack. Now, at the University of Alberta, Canada, researchers have taken a new tack to try to illuminate the manuscript, named for 19th-century Polish bookseller Wilfrid Voynich. Attempts to figure out its code tend to be swiftly debunked by the scholarly community, whether they’re as sensible-seeming as “It’s a woman’s health manual!” or as outlandish as “ I think an alien did it.” Alan Turing and the Bletchley Park team’s attempts to decode it were unsuccessful.
#Voynich manuscript solved full
For hundreds of years, this 15th-century document full of indecipherable writing and cryptic illustrations has sat dark and inscrutable.
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Public DomainĪn emotional investment in the Voynich manuscript offers little in the way of return. The manuscript is currently held at Yale University.