Smithsonian | The Voynich Manuscript has baffled
cryptographers ever since the early 15th-century document was
rediscovered by a Polish book dealer in 1912. The handwritten, 240-page
screed, now housed in Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book &
Manuscript Library, is written from left to right in an unknown
language. On top of that, the text itself is likely to have been
scrambled by an unknown code. Despite numerous attempts to crack the
code by some of the world’s best cryptographers, including Alan Turing
and the Bletchley Park team, the contents of the enigmatic book have
long remained a mystery. But that hasn’t stopped people from trying. The
latest to give it a stab? The Artificial Intelligence Lab at the
University of Alberta.
Bob Weber at the Canadian Press reports that natural
language processing expert Greg Kondrak and grad student Bradley Hauer
have attempted to identify the language the manuscript was written in
using AI. According to a press release,
the team originally believed that the manuscript was written in Arabic.
But after feeding it to an AI trained to recognize 380 languages with 97 percent accuracy, its analysis of the letter frequency suggested the text was likely written in Hebrew.
“That was surprising,” Kondrak says. They
then hypothesized that the words were alphagrams, in which the letters
are shuffled and vowels are dropped. When they unscrambled the first
line of text using that method they found that 80 percent of the words
created were found in the Hebrew dictionary. The research appears in the
journal Transactions of the Association of Computational Linguistics.
Neither of the researchers are schooled in ancient Hebrew, so George Dvorsky at Gizmodo
reports they took their deciphered first line to computer scientist
Moshe Koppel, a colleague and native Hebrew speaker. He said it didn’t
form a coherent sentence. After the team fixed some funky spelling
errors and ran it through Google Translate, they came up with something
readable, even if it doesn’t make much sense: “She made recommendations
to the priest, man of the house and me and people.”
