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AI May Have Finally Decoded the Mysterious 'Voynich Manuscript' (gizmodo.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Since its discovery over a hundred years ago, the 240-page Voynich manuscript, filled with seemingly coded language and inscrutable illustrations, of has confounded linguists and cryptographers. Using artificial intelligence, Canadian researchers have taken a huge step forward in unraveling the document's hidden meaning. Named after Wilfrid Voynich, the Polish book dealer who procured the manuscript in 1912, the document is written in an unknown script that encodes an unknown language -- a double-whammy of unknowns that has, until this point, been impossible to interpret. The Voynich manuscript contains hundreds of fragile pages, some missing, with hand-written text going from left to right. Most pages are adorned with illustrations of diagrams, including plants, nude figures, and astronomical symbols. But as for the meaning of the text -- nothing. No clue. For Greg Kondrak, an expert in natural language processing at the University of Alberta, this seemed a perfect task for artificial intelligence. With the help of his grad student Bradley Hauer, the computer scientists have taken a big step in cracking the code, discovering that the text is written in what appears to be the Hebrew language, and with letters arranged in a fixed pattern. To be fair, the researchers still don't know the meaning of the Voynich manuscript, but the stage is now set for other experts to join the investigation. The researchers used an AI to study "the text of the 'Universal Declaration of Human Rights' as it was written in 380 different languages, looking for patterns," reports Gizmodo. Following this training, the AI analyzed the Voynich gibberish, concluding with a high rate of certainty that the text was written in encoded Hebrew."
The researchers then entertained a hypothesis that the script was created with alphagrams, words in which text has been replaced by an alphabetically ordered anagram. "Armed with the knowledge that text was originally coded from Hebrew, the researchers devised an algorithm that could take these anagrams and create real Hebrew words." Finally, "the researchers deciphered the opening phrase of the manuscript" and ran it through Google Translate to convert it into passable English: "She made recommendations to the priest, man of the house and me and people." The study appears in Transactions of the Association of Computational Linguistics .
The researchers then entertained a hypothesis that the script was created with alphagrams, words in which text has been replaced by an alphabetically ordered anagram. "Armed with the knowledge that text was originally coded from Hebrew, the researchers devised an algorithm that could take these anagrams and create real Hebrew words." Finally, "the researchers deciphered the opening phrase of the manuscript" and ran it through Google Translate to convert it into passable English: "She made recommendations to the priest, man of the house and me and people." The study appears in Transactions of the Association of Computational Linguistics .
The manuscript was 'decoded' long ago, probably nearly two deades ago.
It is written in an americcan indian language.
No idea why people who have the internet ready to 'google' a bit waste time to build an 'AI' for text processing ... and then come to the wrong result.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I call dibs!!
STOP using this phrase in each bi-weekly story about this book only to say at the bottom of each article it "isn't really decoded".
It's "decoded" when the text is readable.
What if they let loose the same AI on the Lorem Ipsum text that we know to be meaningless. Would it come to a similar conclusion? We humans want to see patters where there are none.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
...signals. God luck!
It is really amazing what AI can do. Is there nothing AI can't do? Every week we hear about another AI breakthrough.
Don't translate it!!!
Your brain will turn into mush from colluding with the RUSSIANS!! RUSSIANS!! RUSSIANS!!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Failing to find any Hebrew scholars who could help validate their findings, the researchers eventually resorted to using Google Translate,
(Source)
This "research" is a joke.
"Armed with the knowledge that text was originally coded from Hebrew, the researchers devised an algorithm that could take these anagrams and create real Hebrew words." Finally, "the researchers deciphered the opening phrase of the manuscript" and ran it through Google Translate to convert it into passable English:
Fuck no. This has presumably been written by a human who was in control of the process. You don't let something "impartial" like Google Translate at it which will not balk at making sense from noise. Instead you ask a Hebrew scholar to get a proper assessment of which actual language competency might be involved and reflected here (it's entirely possible that somebody created a joke using a dictionary but no language knowledge of his own to speak of, but even that can be figured out with human intelligence and knowledge).
In brief, the manuscript says, "Dear World, this is my esoteric theory of the nature of the universe. I wrote it because I am very very smart, and you should pay attention to me, and shower me with honors. Because it is esoteric and holds the key to all metaphysical knowledge, I have written it such that only the most intelligent and worthy may know its secrets. However, if no one decodes it, I will die happy because it proves I was the smartest person alive. Sincerely, Yaddayadda."
you would think over time people would become less gullible, not more.
and sure, if you train an AI long and hard enough, it will probably be able to tickle out something that looks like meaning from that nonsense. just like if you train an AI to see dogs, it can identify weird dogs in literally any image.
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
i could live a little longer in this prison
https://arstechnica.com/scienc...
its the puzzle that keeps on giving!
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
Is proof this is a fake. They ran their algorithm, got something almost sensible for the first sentence, and the rest was total gibberish but they needed to publish.
https://xkcd.com/593/
It is obvious when you think about it...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
you would think over time people would become less gullible, not more.
One would think so, but Creationism is on the rise again.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand the Voynich Manuscript. The apparently gibberish is extremely well-crafted, and without a solid grasp of linguistics most suggested translations will confuse a typical researcher's head. There's also the manuscript's occult outlook, which is deftly woven into its illustrations- its age-old philosophy draws heavily from Alchemy and Pagan allegory.
If it's contended that the words are encoded as alphagrams (e.g. the letters of the words are sorted in as specific order), all that's needed to disprove that is find a counterexample.
On the first fucking page, there's a word transcribed as "ro" followed a few lines later by a word transcribed as "chtor".
In other words, there is no consistent alphagram ordering. In one word, "r" comes before "o", while in another, "o" comes before "r".
I would be a lot more convinced if they listed their claimed alphabetical order and showed what percentage of "words" follow that order.
In short, Fuck computational linguistics. "Ooh, look at me! My field is so ill-defined, I can subscribe to any of dozens of contradictory models and still be taken seriously!"
Probably is Turkish or Indian in origin and is a medical text. It's probably not a cipher, just a dead language.
Since its discovery over a hundred years ago, the 240-page Voynich manuscript, filled with seemingly coded language and inscrutable illustrations, of has confounded linguists and cryptographers.
"of has confounded" - ?
Ah, I get it. It's not terrible editing, it's more mysterious encryption!
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
you would think over time people would become less gullible, not more.
One would think so, but Creationism is on the rise again.
And Hillary! damn near got elected by fooling enough people into thinking "MUH VAGINA!" was a good enough reason to vote for her.
Wasn't it determined to be an encoded obgyn manual last year?
... the text is really just gibberish, a practical joke created by the author, and the AI is just an ~infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of typewriters~ type of thing, eventually "finding" something that may make sense.
it's just more religious fuckwittery from that part of the world.
Just what we need.
It hasn't. And if you actually read about it, it was a tool used to assist humans, it was not fed the manuscript like cookie dough only to spit out delicious cookies later on. Enough with the clickbait and the hyperbole.
fuck off, misogynist garbage.
i could live a little longer in this prison
They use a buzzword to get into news feeds and obtain relevance and further funding. There is no AI, they didn't use AI, all they did is write some software to compare pieces of text.
AI Superstar K. Christopher McKinstry's GAC could have solved this if he didn't end his own life.
See subject: Your MASSIVE FAIL in this life is you're nothing more than a chattering little do-nothing "ne'er-do-well" online & you know it...
* Is that the best your "phantasyland FAKE NAME" (for your fake lie of a so-called 'life') can manage?
APK
P.S.=> When a FAKE NAME do nothing like YOU does better than I have? Then talk (you're all talk & no action)... apk
IF the "best ya got" is IMPERSONATING ME you need to grow up. I did however write that to AmiMojo who gave me a hard time 1st here https://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=11669269&cid=56030371/ for the snide comment I replied to.
* AmiMojo DESERVED IT...
APK
P.S.=> Whoever YOU are? You're pitiful - I'd almost BET you're AmiMojo though (guess the truth of what I said to you in the link above REALLY got to you, eh? Yes, obviously)... apk
The manuscript is intriguing, but we can't say it's important without knowing the message. It could be entirely meaningless.
-Dave
They "decoded" but don't know the meaning of it?
"Drink your Ovaltine" - a crummy commercial.
Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.
The AI book that everyone should get is available for pre-order. "Artificial Intelligence For Dummies" by John Paul Mueller and Luca Massaron.
"for dark is the suede that mows like a harvest" /sarcasm.
Wow, some pretty serious research here...
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
does being against one woman mean he's against all women? are you a misandrist because you don't like him? cmon.
Turns out that once decoded the Voynich manuscript detailed all the reasons that Alexander Peter Kowalski is in fact a retard.
It first starts with the sever mental limitations he developed as a child.
This however wasn't his fault as both of his parents were of well below average intelligence.
The it goes on to describe how the massive freak head trauma he suffered playing with a nerf ball further limited his abilities.
The manuscript goes into great detail on APK's inability to form coherent thoughts and even understand simple logic and basic mathematics.
It points to excessive spamming of failed ideas, belief in conspiracy theories, and antisemitic rants as some of Alexander Peter Kowalski's distinctive traits.
Finally the Voynich manuscript strongly discourages people from using Alexander Peter Kowalski's overly complex, bloated, slow, and ineffective tools as they do not provide any security.
As if that wasn't coded enough
Thankfully she didn't win! She was horrible. Trump has been pretty good so far!
I was saying this just the other day about the Zodiac killer's coded messages.. what if the author made a coding error? It would be so easy to do and just a couple errors could render the whole thing totally useless.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I look forward to seeing the fully decoded text. Until now all indications were that it was a "spooky" coffee table book full of nonsense text.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
If they can get coherent results using only machine translation, not understanding the base language themselves, this gives an even stronger claim in some ways that they have really cracked the code. We will know they aren't hand-tweaking the results to get what they want, because they don't actually know what they want. They only know what comes out the other end of the process.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
as an anti-Trump plot and then all the alt-right bros could parrot it in comments sections.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
Have gnu, will travel.
It's a cookbook!
awesome First Post troll, look at all the biters
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
It will be exciting to see this process applied to the untranslated Indus Valley Language and Easter Island glyphs.
http://content.time.com/time/w...
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
Everybody knows that the Voynich manuscript actually describes how to bypass the booby-traps on Oak Island to recover the Ark of the Covenant hidden there by Mayan Templars. I saw a documentary about that on the History Channel, Rick Only offered $50 for it.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Not sure what to make of the decoded title - "To Serve Man"
Once you translate a LONG text , then YES it means you have soemthing. but analyzing a few words / a single sentence ? Time and time again we get news somebody found out the code on the infamous manuscript, and it NEVER pans out. Heck, if they got so much success for 1 sentence, WHY oh WHY there is no report on translating a whole page which would be a good evidence ? Instead we get this report about one sentence. Reproducibility is key to demonstrate that the manuscript is translated. If they got a page call me. Until then raise your skepticism shield, this is research result N+1 into pretending they found a solution.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
That's the biggest news since it was translated completely a year ago! Wow!
See subject & a subject you RAN from (after you lied & I tore you apart point by point on your mistakes) https://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=11606243&cid=55924893/ - you're unable to backup your "21 yrs. of securing systems" & that you 'write REAL securityware' (bullshit).
* It's terribly EASY to destroy a fool like you by letting YOU do it to yourself (especially in my 'ps' below, lol).
Lastly - takes a "REAL MAN" (not) in your constantly stalking/harassing & impersonating me & you are NOT a 'security guru' dumbass - the link above PROVES it (along w/ you being able to prove your words there too, lol).
APK
P.S.=> Your "mathematics" (not even a theory, mere hypothesis REALITY of my ware working on the threat involved killed easily)? They BACKFIRED on you fool (lol, was priceless & classic) https://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=11532533&cid=55833641/ & you have no proof of such a botnet & even IF you did it would be nigh impossible to manage due to 'theoretical sizes' you used (can't even hold the data for it on disk as YOU SAID)? As long as it's hostname driven (99% are), hosts can stall it as they did the one in the link I just posted (you lose) ... apk
As soon as you see "anagram" mentioned as part of the process to decode a cipher, you can stop reading, it's not a solution. If you allow for an arbitrary arrangement of letters or symbols as part of the solution, you can arrive at pretty much *any* text as the result, with no real connection to the cipher you started with.
Based upon the alleged translation, it sounds like the mystical writings of a religious nut. Those people are dedicated and have the time and motivation to produce such stuff.
I used to know one such person. She would involve you in her never-ending stream of consciousness conversation; you were never privy to the beginning, and you never saw the end either. You'd get dropped into the middle and struggle constantly to try to figure out the basic landmarks, characters and plot points. Mostly you wanted to limit your time in the crazy zone.
Makes sense to me. I vote that it was produced by some religious zealot.
Don't feed the Trump trolls. They are desperate for attention and you just gave it some.
Sorry retard Alexander Peter Kowalski you lie again and lost a long time ago.
You are incapable of providing proof of any statement you make.
You fail to understand the simple mathematics that prove your statements are false.
You post the same tired BS over and over again and and claim that your wild speculation is proof instead of just the ravings of a developmentally disabled individual.
I do not impersonate you as I am the guy who calls you a retard, no more no less.
Like I have said countless times just because your feeble mind is incapable of understanding something doesn't make it false.
Your arguments get proven false by anyone who argues with you but you, like the retard you are, fail to see where you lost and then you double down on it by declaring that you won.
Countless people have proven you wrong but you lack the mental facilities to understand that.
Also your work is always playing catch up and you don't even do the hard work of actually identifying malicious hosts, so at best you wrote an overly complex, slow, bloated file aggregator that is very poorly designed, I mean you seriously have to recompile code when there are TLD updates it must be poorly designed.
Also it doesn't help your case that you use people's quotes that you have taken out of context or that they have disavowed and use them as proof of support against them.
Doing things like that really makes you look like a retard and should rightfully discredit any other use of people's statements by you.
I have yet to see an actual endorsement of your work form a real security expert, and a link to it under the Misc. software section of a random web page is not an endorsement.
You should also stop posting links to your previous shit posts or saying see subject as there is never anything of value in any of them that actually proves your point and instead you just make yourself look evermore the fool.
Maybe you should try posting your BS on some other site like 4chan as there might be people there who haven't heard you BS or seen it proven false.
It is no wonder that people find there own ways to mock you.
Speaking of which I haven't seen some of your trolls lately, some of them were actually fairly humorous.
And flat earthers. Very strange, they were almost extinct. Similarly, conspiracy theorists seemed also to be on the decline but they're very common these days too.
REALITY & you did in your 'phantasy' on 'math' ahref=https://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=11532533&cid=55833641/rel=url2html-12214https://yro.slashdot.org/comme...> it'd be impossible to manage due to size (can't even hold the data for it on disk as YOU SAID)!
IF hostname driven (99% are) hosts stall it!
A 'real security expert'? Like you?? LMAO - you ran from backing that up despite your crap you spew with no proof of it to YOUR CREDIT ahref=https://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=11606243&cid=55924893/rel=url2html-12214https://yro.slashdot.org/comme...>
In your "21 yrs. of securing systems" & that you 'write REAL securityware' (bs).
BOTTOM-LINE: Real security pros Malwarebytes' hpHosts BOTH host & recommends my work vs. your bs you loser do-nothing UNIDENTIFIABLE "ne'er-do-well JEALOUS JOWIE"!
APK
P.S.=> REAL security pros think hosts = good security https://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=11549257&cid=55839269/ & registered /.ers (not UNIDENTIFIABLE BLOWHARDS in you) disagree w/ you on my ware's efficacy & quality https://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=11595279&cid=55903895/
REALITY & you did in your 'phantasy' on 'math' ahref=https://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=11532533&cid=55833641/rel=url2html-9809https://yro.slashdot.org/comme...> it'd be impossible to manage due to size (can't even hold the data for it on disk as YOU SAID)!
IF hostname driven (99% are) hosts stall it!
A 'real security expert'? Like you?? LMAO - you ran from backing that up despite your crap you spew with no proof of it to YOUR CREDIT ahref=https://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=11606243&cid=55924893/rel=url2html-9809https://yro.slashdot.org/comme...>
In your "21 yrs. of securing systems" & that you 'write REAL securityware' (bs).
BOTTOM-LINE: Real security pros Malwarebytes' hpHosts BOTH host & recommends my work vs. your bs you loser do-nothing UNIDENTIFIABLE "ne'er-do-well JEALOUS JOWIE"!
APK
P.S.=> REAL security pros think hosts = good security https://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=11549257&cid=55839269/ & registered /.ers (not UNIDENTIFIABLE BLOWHARDS in you) disagree w/ you on my ware's efficacy & quality https://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=11595279&cid=55903895/
Actually when it was decoded the researches found a url. They typed in the address and received the following message:
Penis.
Link
After all, you can enter random meaningless strings of nonsense Japanese characters into Google translate and it will fit the closest English it can to what you entered. You end up with some semblance of real English, but the original text was literally nonsense to begin with. (Although the result can be genius in its own way -- a while ago I tried one random string and Google returned "bitches in the sky." Not bad.)
To translate Hebrew to English? These seem like serious scientists, unable to wait five minutes to get a hold of a rabbi before publishing...
A prank or something written by a madman. Even if it is highly plausible, knowing what the prank is about is interesting by itself.
It is noteworthy that it seems to follow patterns of natural languages (ex: Zipf law). So it is unlikely to be random.
didn't kabbala use to do something similar? Is this just a circular joke?
From Wikipedia :-
Linguistic mysticism of Hebrew
Kabbalistic thought extended Biblical and Midrashic notions that God enacted Creation through the Hebrew language and through the Torah into a full linguistic mysticism. In this, every Hebrew letter, word, number, even accent on words of the Hebrew Bible contain esoteric meanings, describing the spiritual dimensions within exoteric ideas, and it teaches the hermeneutic methods of interpretation for ascertaining these meanings. Names of God in Judaism have further prominence, though fluidity of meaning turns the whole Torah into a Divine name.
Maybe it is someones godly remix?
Look, they didn’t “use an AI”, they ran it through a pattern matching
machine until they came up with a hit. And when they came up with a “hit”,
it was an 80% match. Match to what? The encypherment they are proposing is
alphabetically ordered acronyms.
That’s a stunningly stupid way of encrypting a text, especially if it’s a
reference work which you presumably want to read in real time, instead of
having to laboriously decrypt it. Especially when that text contains
technical terms and the encryption method is hugely lossy.
Example:
*Ahstt a gilnnnstuy dipstu awy fo ceginnprty a ettx, aceeillpsy fi ist a
ceeeefnrr korw chhiw ouy abelmprsuy antw ot ader in aelr eimt, adeinst fo
aghinv ot abilloorsuy cdeprty it. Aceeillpsy ehnw ahtt ettx acinnost
accehilnt emrst adn eht ceinnoprty dehmot is eghluy lossy.*
And it’s worse for Hebrew, because the triconsonantal root system it uses
means that for any given word, there will usually be several anagrams of it
which are also words. Oh, and worse again, because unpointed Hebrew doesn’t
encode short vowels, so you can also add vowels back into the “decrypted”
text until you get something you like.
This is *Bible Code* level nonsense. What they’ve done is find that if you
map the Voynich letters to one of any possible of the possible alphabets,
and rearrange those letters in any way you want,then there’s almost a match
to Hebrew, if you are allowed to pick which words you decrypt from the
myriad of possiblities, add the missing vowels as you please, then correct
the result until you get something meaningful out of Google Translate (and
that’s a whole *other* bucket of worms). Also, let’s just ignore that many
of the words in the Voynich manuscript don’t fit Hebrew word length
patterns, and also let’s just ignore the 20% of words which *don’t *fit,
even given the already extremely forgiving pick-and-mix method.
Much more interesting than all the totally predictable Russia trolls. If I didn't think Slashdot/Dice was so idiotic, I'd say the mass of Russia stories were a honeypot to gather IP addresses, linguistic analysis, etc. of the Russia trolls. But it's more believable to me they are just after traffic, any traffic. I wonder how many click on ads?
My guess is that there's a connection. Some of those that take this bible thing serious think that their book could in some way be wrong if the Earth wasn't flat, so it MUST be flat because the book MUST be right.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Except that the book doesn't say that. Of course, when you get into people who are literalists then even obviously poetical statement is treated as literal truth.
Flat earthers in my experience seem to be much more politically minded than religious, believing there's a big conspiracy out there to hide the truth. They're individuals, they don't learn flat earth beliefs from their parents or community, it's something they pick up as an adult.
I've had my share of religiously motivated flat earthers. And yes, the bible actually talks about a firmament spanning above the earth and stuff, and for literalists this means that it cannot be a globe. Because on a globe, a "firmament above" is pretty much impossible.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Which company will adapt the manuscript for TV? It has lots of words and stuff, but I need more visuals.