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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The researchers then entertained a hypothesis that the script was created with alphagrams, words in which text has been replaced by an alphabetically ordered anagram.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 .
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.
Citations sorely needed...
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.
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.
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.
"Drink your Ovaltine" - a crummy commercial.
Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.
actually a *very* possible hypothesis.
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
AI can only know what humans know. If humans consider something impossible then so does the AI.
All AI is doing is getting to answers faster than humans can.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
A lot of scientific knowledge, especially medical, were secretive at some time. Knowledge was protected, guilds were formed to protect the secrets, and so forth. So texts would be written to be obscure, intentionally.
I think you were thinking of this: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24987-mexican-plants-could-break-code-on-gibberish-manuscript/, which is about the drawings in the manuscript, NOT the words. I suggest you ask your doctor about age related dementia.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
I don't know if you knew this, but patent nonsense is also easily found via Google and other search engines. This is especially true of the Voynich manuscript. This is one reason why it is considered courteous for a person making an argument to give some pointers as to which information they believe supports that argument.
This is a random Internet comment section, so nobody expects a comprehensive literature review. But, you know, something.
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