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Making The Case That Voynich Is A Hoax
DeadVulcan writes "The Voynich Manuscript, a mysterious book of uncertain age, is widely believed to be written either in an unknown language or a long-lost encryption scheme. Nature reports that computer scientist Gordon Rugg has demonstrated that it's possible to generate a text like the Voynich manuscript -- containing language-like regularities, despite being potentially meaningless -- using cryptographic techniques of the time. This lends some support to those who claim that the book is a hoax."
01001001011000110110100000100000011001000110010101 10111001101011011001010010000001110011011001010110 10010110111000100000011101100110010101110010011011 01011101010111010001101100011010010110001101101000 00100000011001010110100101101110011001010110111000 10000001010100011011110111000001100110001000000110 00010110111000100000010100110110001101101000011001 0101101001110111110110010100101110
"...all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness..." yada yada
Somebody is laughing a lot.. Remember way back the Salamander Papers?
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Abdook artelly oppetrom uplocty?! Astenboorsley... af arcoolodople!
Bli, Fal.
Gordon Rugg has demonstrated that it's possible to generate a text like the Voynich manuscript -- containing language-like regularities, despite being potentially meaningless
That's funny. I thought Darl McBride had already proven that with all those open letters he's written.
Mod me down, hippies!
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
I think this report is missing the fact that if someone really wanted to make a hoax book, they could simply translate any other book (even the bible) into a made up language. If it's an obscure book the likliness that anyone would every figure it out is slim.
-Zibi
Sounds a bit like the Beale Papers.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
I'm sorry, but calling the Voynich Manuscript a hoax is unfeasible. Sure, could it have in theory been a hoax? Yes, but there is no point to this. The "hoaxer" creates this in 3+ months, with very accurate drawings, and probably hangs on to it till he dies, so that it can be sold to a king 100 years later and eventually make it to america? Then again, maybe Nostradamus wrote it.
And why did you staple the trout to the RAM?
The technique really is interesting. We have techniques that can identify patterns that are meaningful (all of cryptology, most of number theory, graph theory) but this application is neat because it is an effort to prove--rigorously--that a given set of data is just total noise.
"Oh, the tragedy of math gone wrong. I can't even talk about it." -Wil Wheaton http://www.wilwheaton.net
Had Mr Rugg just used rot13 he would've cracked the code long ago. Want Crypto?
MoFscker
...but it's another thing to prove it.
Anyone can say anything is a hoax but it takes scientific evidence - actual empirical data - to prove such a claim.
For example, people once believed that the Earth was flat (some people still do) but the circumnavigation of the globe by explorers such as Magellan, lunar exclipses, etc provide evidence to the contrary.
Saying that just because something could be a hoax then it is a hoax is just plain stupid. Like Fermat's Last Theorem, it may be many years before Voynich is proved to be geniune or accurate, but the absence of proof of the former doesn't provide proof of the latter. Remember, even though TLF has been proved, we still don't have the "simple proof" that Fermat himself discovered.
Saying that the manuscript is more likely to be a hoax than not just because computer scientists have theorised that it could have been faked in the 16th century is like a 25th century scholar saying that the Wright Brothers flight, the atomic bomb and the Apollo missions are more likely to be hoaxes than not just because they could have been faked with 20th century technology.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
In case you're wondering what it looks like
http://www.voynich.nu/
There is a portion of Cryptonomicom by Neal Stephenson where a real book of coded intercepts is replaced by random number strings encrypted with a fairly simple scheme.
Does anyone know if this book is a seed for Stephenson's story? He draws an awful lot of information from the history of computing for his stories.
I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid. -Theo
Does anyone else get the feeling that these people are just saying "It's too hard. We give up" ?
IWARS.
People, in general, disappoint me. Politicians even more so.
I've studied the Voynich manuscript before, and the possibility of a hoax seems just as unlikely as many of the theories that have been floating about. Yes, the language of the Voynich manuscript could be an elaborate hoax, but Rugg's analysis only proves what is already widely known.
The problem of creating such an elaborate hoax is that even Rugg's theory doesn't explain all the features of the Voynich manuscript. Furthermore, it seems unlikely that a sixteenth-century forger would go to the trouble of creating something that would have all the qualities of a real language and would include techniques that would deliberately resemble an actual document when viewed with analytical techniques that wouldn't be developed later. Occam's Razor makes it seem more likely that there some kind of language operating in the manuscript than a random system of patterns. Then again, there's no real way of knowing.
There are some images of the text of the Voynich Manuscript available here. Analysis of the text and the illustrations support the theory that the manuscript has defined sections on astrology, herbal medicine, and other subjects. There have been some serious and some rediculous theories about the manuscript from the intriguing notion that the Voynich text is mathematically similar to East Asian languages like Chinese or Vietnamese, or that the Voynich manuscript is written in an ancient form of Ukrainian. (I've read the supposed translation of it from the Ukrainian, and it hardly makes sense given that the manuscript's illustations don't match the text of the supposed translation.)
In the meantime, this site offers more information on modern translation efforts including a font for the Voynich script. (Which would make a lovely way of annoying co-workers by switching their default system font to Voynich text...)
Prof. Rugg has a website about his methods and results, which may be of interest.
It has a slow load due to java applets though.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
Champolion cracked the Rosetta stone with much much less.
The 'true' examples of lost written languages/cyphers (do a google search) are mysteries because there exist few examples of brief length usually bereft of context (of grammar, history, linguistic evolution etc.).
The sheer volume of the Voynich manuscript, plus its origin in relatively modern Europe is what makes it so interesting to amateur cryptographers.
The Nature Paper is too brief to know how good Rugg's analysis is (and the Cryptologia site has been slashdotted), but if it holds up it is an interesting result, even if it is a conclusion that many "very smart cryptographers"(TM) have suspected for a long time
Those who read the article can take note of an interesting challenge: though Rugg has shown that it is possible to generate a high quality hoax using a Cardan grille, proving it to be a hoax may require producing a character grid that will actually generate large portions of the text. My question is, could that be done with a genetic algorithm, and are any Slashdotters up to the task?
Also, a few comments about formal analysis. Notice that if you took some arbitrary text, typeset it in a fixed-width font to force the characters into columns, and then skimmed it with a grille in order to generate a new text, you would automatically preserve such basic statistics as character frequency, including spaces and also punctuation if you used them in your grid. (Depending on how you applied the grille, you could actually be generating a simple permutation of the original text.) However, you would disrupt all the within-word correlations.
For example, in compound words derived from Latin there is a familiar pattern where ad C* ==> aCC* (where C is some arbitrary consonant), but that pattern would be completely obscured if the characters were read off a diagonal grille as shown in the photograph. You would still get the increased frequency for C, but not the common aCC pattern.
More subtly, there are some well known universals of syllable structure in natural languages, but those would be scrambled just as the aCC would be. You would have the right proportions of consonants and vowels, but not a realistic distribution within words.
Likewise, prefixes and suffixes would be scrambled. If it is a hoax generated by a Cardan grille, it should not have prefix/suffix patterns that occur commonly in many languages. (Ditto for suffixal inflections.) In fact, the letters appearing at the beginnings and ends of words should be a random sampling from the frequency distribution of letters in the whole text; this may be the easiest metric to check.
Also, by using spaces as characters in your grid you'd get the right proportion of spaces, and therefore the right average word length, but you would obscure any patterns in word length. Someone has already linked to studies of the word lengths in the manuscripts, but those assumed that the distribution of Latin word lengths word lengths would be preserved. However, only the average would be preserved. I suspect the distribution would be converted to a gaussian. Anyone got time for the experiment? (Notice that you may generate extra spaces with the grille, depending on how you use it. For example, what do you do when your grille starts running off the bottom of the page in your source text? Or, if your grille has 10 windows, do you transcribe to the first space and then move the grille, or do you transcribe everything in the grille and insert a "virtual" space for position 11? It looks to me like you might be able to generate the document's actual "word" lengths from Latin, given only some very basic assumptions.)
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
One definition of randomness, and one that seems quite reasonable is that a string is "random" if it cannot be compressed to smaller than it is, i.e. listing its characters itself is the most compact possible description. Formally, a string is random if there exists no algorithm generating the string whose description on some universal Turing machine is smaller than the string itself (this is the definition used in the field of Kolmogorov complexity). A string of a billion digits making up Pi, for example, is not random by this definition, as one can easily write a short program, whose length would certainly be less than one billion characters, whose output is the digits of Pi. Think of it this way: the most general form of pattern matching device that we know of is a Turing machine, and if the best device you can construct to match that pattern is as complex or more complex than the pattern itself, then well, you have total randomness. Unfortunately, rigorously proving that a particular string is random by this very strong definition is extremely difficult, as you run into undecidability everywhere you turn.
This is the sort of stuff that real theoretical computer science is made of. For a very good overview of the theory of Kolmogorov Complexity and algorithmic information theory, Gregory Chaitin's home page is a good starting point
To go back to the Voynich manuscript, if there is some sort of regularity that can be discerned from it, then perhaps a context-free or context-sensitive (or something in between) language may be found to characterize it. Once you have such a syntactic characterization, perhaps it might be possible to divine the semantics from context. The shape of the grammar that results may well prove whether the Manuscript is in fact a real language, a fabrication, an elaborate cipher, or just total gibberish.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
oops. extraneous space in the link. Here's one you just need to click
If you and other purport it having a meaning then you should come forward with it. Unless you have compelling evidence, thern what you are presenting is no more no less than wishfull thinking or belief.
Indeed right now it isn't prooved at all that this manuscript has any meaning (encrypted or not) and a researcher prooved that you can reproduce most of the feature of the manuscript by using an encryption technic born a few year earlier. Furthermore the person selling it to the first known possessor was a forger. Yes not all feature are repdroduced. But this is a step forward.
The burden of proof is with you and "Then again, there's no real way of knowing." isn't an answer. At least none a scientific and a person interresed into knowing moer hold for enough. And, yes "Voynich manuscript. Furthermore, it seems unlikely that a sixteenth-century forger would go to the trouble of creating something that would have all the qualities of a real language and would include techniques that would deliberately resemble" Well I have news for you. 3.5 Kilogram gold (a prince wealth for the time) make it more likely than you wish to hold it.
You might have included a lot of link making people see your post as informative, but frankly it isn't especially your dubious use of Occam's Razor (The explanation needing the LESS number of new entity is the most probable). Sorry but to purport that the manuscript hold meaning is having one unknown new entity (from where that language come ?) more than purporting that using the clever trick aforementionned (available at that time) which hold no unknown new entity.
My final point is, Occam's razor only say you what is the most likely explanation. NOT WHAT IS THE CORRECT ONE.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Example, my house catches fire. Firefighters are unable to determine the source. The insurance company denies my claim on the grounds that the technology existed to rub two sticks together to generate heat and produce fire.
Of course, this is ridiculous. But there have been many who claimed that producing a hoax as convincing as the Voynich papers was virtually impossible. Rugg has shown that, at the earliest known date of "discovery," it was possible, and perhaps well worth doing for the price it fetched.
So, your analogy is incomplete. The insurance company's argument would have some relevance if you had previously been claiming that it was technologically impossible for you to light the fire. They just produced a counter-argument.
Coming back to the Voynich manuscript, it just means that the possibility of a hoax cannot be ruled out because of the effort required to produce it. Turns out it's not as hard as people thought.
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
I do believe that there are "codes" in the Bible, but the reason is different than what the fanatics describe. My belief is that the Bible codes exist for only one reason: to ensure accuracy. Consider the following:
The cat in the hat caught a rat and that was the end of that.
Notice the rhyming. Now translated into spanish (courtesy babelfish):
El gato en el sombrero cogio una rata y ese era el final de eso.
Now translated back into english:
The cat in the hat took a rat and that one was the end of that.
Okay, so notice in the original that the rhyming words appeared in positions 1, 4, 7, 9, and 14 (zero based). In the retranslation, the rhyming words appear in positions 1, 4, 7, 9 and 15. This disparity alone is enough to determine that the retranslation is not accurate.
Supposing that one writes in such a manner that there is a definitive pattern to their sentences and word choices, it is easy to determine the accuracy of a text after having gone through many translations. For a book such as the Bible, this was of paramount importance. I believe the original purpose of the "Bible codes" was to ensure that the meaning of scripture was not lost as it was passed from one generation to the next.
Consider for example, the poem. If a poem is incorrectly copied, it no longer rhymes, or the meter is disrupted. This simple mechanism not only ensures easy memorization, but provides a security against unintended alteration. In much the same manner, the "Bible codes" have provided scholars a way of discerning the accuracy of a copy of scripture. In fact, some of scripture is indeed poetic, further reinforcing the confidence in the original scriptures.
I find it somewhat interesting that lossless copying was available long before digital electronics were invented.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Have they tried casting "Read Magic" on it?
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
Source: http://www.keele.ac.uk/depts/cs/staff/g.rugg/voyn
It is very, very, very unlikely that common words would be repeated again and again and again unless someone really, really, really wanted to.
Some other good links for Voynich information:
Elonka :)