Voynich Manuscript

Mike Friday 28 Jun 2013

The Voynich Manuscript is a famous enigmatic book from Europe ostensibly written in an unknown and undeciphered language during the Renaissance (though some think it is of modern origin). It is full of elaborate but weird illustrations of unknown plants, astrological diagrams, little naked women in tubs connected by pipes, and other oddities.

I'm putting this in the history rather than the language subforum because it is uncertain that the book is not a hoax. Then again, it's also uncertain that the book is a hoax. The debate has continued for decades and we may never know for sure.

High tech analysis and the book nobody can read

Colin Druce-McFadden
Wednesday, June 26, 2013 - 1:44pm

Credit: NASA

In 1912 a man by the name of Wilfrid Voynich discovered a book, made up of 104 separate folios in a strange language, in an Italian monastery. The tomes were later carbon dated, and found to hail from the 1400s. Ever since its discovery, people have attempted to decipher this nameless, authorless book — without success.

So fruitless has the search for a cipher to the book been that it has many an expert calling fraud . But a new study of the so-called Voynich Manuscript by theoretical physicist Marcelo Montemurro and colleague Damián H. Zanette hints that the manuscript just might be the real deal, and not a bunch of gibberish.

Utilizing a series of algorithms, Montemurro's team has concluded that the manuscript does harbor meaning. The team's proof of this comes from a pattern distribution algorithm known as "entropy," which studies the complexity of any text it is given. Montemurro and his team fed sections of the Voynich manuscript into the entropy engine, along with samples of English, Chinese, the programming language Fortran and Yeast DNA.

Entropy then assigned a number to each sample based on its complexity. The higher the number, the more complex the sample was found to be. Unsurprisingly, the Yeast DNA came out as the least complex, scoring 25 points. Next lowest was the sample of Fortran, coming in at 285. But when it came to the remaining samples, scores jumped noticeably. Chinese came in at 580, English at 728 and the Voynich script topped the list at 805.

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