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."

Comments

The Salamander Papers

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

Somebody is laughing a lot.. Remember way back the Salamander Papers?

Library of Babel

[Mrs. Grundy]

This reminds me of a passage from Jorge Luis Borges' Library of Babel. In fact a lot reminds me of that story these days.

Five hundred years ago, the chief of an upper hexagon (2) came upon a book as confusing as the others, but which had nearly two pages of homogeneous lines. He showed his find to a wandering decoder who told him the lines were written in Portuguese; others said they were Yiddish. Within a century, the language was established: a Samoyedic Lithuanian dialect of Guarani, with classical Arabian inflections. The content was also deciphered: some notions of combinative analysis, illustrated with examples of variations with unlimited repetition.

Re:Ershlap?

[decipher_saint]

Are you my boss, 'cause you sound like him...

Am I fired yet?

Re:My 2 cents

[Anonymous Coward]

Translation from binary:
Ich denke sein vermutlich einen

Translation from German from binary:
I probably think its one

Google found me this

[ElDuque]

In case you're wondering what it looks like

http://www.voynich.nu/

Re:Ridiculous

[Seth Morabito]

The point of a hoax, in my opinion, would most likely have been financial gain.

There is no clear evidence pointing to an exact date that the manuscript was written, and the only firm circumstantial evidence we have to go on is Marcus Marci's letter to Anasthasius Kirchir, which mentions that the manuscript was sold to King Rudolph for 600 ducats. That is a heck of a lot of money. It seems perfectly reasonable to me that someone manufactured the manuscript to extract 600 ducats from the emperor.

This assumes a lot. It assumes that the letter is genuine, and it assumes that the facts mentioned in the letter are true, and it assumes that Rudolph was the first buyer, so it is by no means a sure thing. But a lot of us who lean (gingerly) toward the hoax theory stand by Occam's Razor, which points to a hoax being at least a feasable, and probably even likely solution. Rugg's analysis is just more circumstantial evidence, not proof, but every little bit weights the scale more.

Re:Missing the fact....

[Anonymous Coward]

actually very few people could write on any known topic (such as a topic for which we have a contemporaneous book in a known language) in a consistent but made-up language without being easily decipherable. We couoldn't figure out ancient egyptian because we had no idea what topic they were even talking about.... ALL it took to figure out ancient egyptian was being told (in ancient Greek, which we knew) what topic a couple of sentences of egyptian were talking about...we had no idea, having almost NO idea what various examples of the writing could POSSIBLY have stood for.

Missing a (cryptographic) clue ...

[Professor D]

But, a volume of self consistent language (even a made up one) of over a hundred pages of text with accompanying pictures should fall to statistical and linguistic analysis.

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

Re: Missing a (cryptographic) clue ...

[Black Parrot]

> But, a volume of self consistent language (even a made up one) of over a hundred pages of text with accompanying pictures should fall to statistical and linguistic analysis.

I doubt it. How many possible mappings are there between strings of characters and meanings? And even with plausible interpretations of the pictures (e.g., a herbarium), the number of things that might be said in that context is for all purposes unbounded:

xyz =?= "this soothes the throbbing toe"
xyz =?= "this is very poisonous"
xyz =?= "this grows only in Ys"
xyz =?= "I learned this from my grandmother" ...

Surely it will never be deciphered if it is in an unknown language.

> Champolion cracked the Rosetta stone with much much less.

Actually, he had the benefit of a parallel text.

In the absence of a parallel text, this will only be decyphered the way Linear B was: after a rigorous analysis of the patterns in the text, and a much tighter context (essentially lists of <picture,name,number> tuples), it was noticed that some very obvious translations ("man" and "woman", or such) fit the inflectional pattern of a language historically spoken in the region where the texts were found, and that simple mapping could be extended to other obvious <picture,name> pairs without introducing inconsistencies.

I suppose it's possible that something similar could be done with the manuscript, but IMO only if there are some clearly labeled images that give tight enough a context to guess the specific word being used. And then some luck, because somebody has to recognize some language-specific patterns (such as the Greek masculine/feminine inflectional suffixes). And of course, more luck in what language it happens to be: Linear B might never have been deciphered if Greek didn't use gender-based patterns in its noun declensions.

If it happens to be written in some unknown language, IMO it will never be deciphered.

repeats

[1u3hr]

The Nature story says:

The text contains some features that are not seen in any language. The most common words are often repeated two or three times, for example - the equivalent of English using 'and and and' - giving weight to the hoax theory.

Indonesian pluralises words by duplicating them (anak = child, anak anak = children). And many languages, including English ("he was really, really stupid") intensify by repetition, so this point is not at all conclusive.

Re:Missing the fact....

[1u3hr]

if someone really wanted to make a hoax book, they could simply translate any other book (even the bible) into a made up language.

Making up a language, that isn't just a scrambled version of an existing one, is very, very hard. It takes someone like Tolkien (a professor of Old English who could translate Norse on the fly) to do that convincingly, and I doubt that anyone in the period could have done it in a way that would still defy detection.

Can you say "Kolmogorov complexity"?

[dido]

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.