![]() ![]() Beyond that, the researchers based their analysis on a debatable theory that the Voynich is also encoded in anagrams, a hypothesis that has been suggested before but which is not supported by scholarly consensus. In addition, Kondrak and Hauer’s algorithm merely produces suggestions for potential matches but doesn’t evaluate the likelihood of these matches. ![]() “The grammar, spelling, and vocabulary would have been quite different, especially for a manuscript like the Voynich that is scientific in nature,” Davis said. Lisa Fagin Davis, executive director of the Medieval Academy of America, told the Verge that an algorithm trained to identify modern languages cannot reliably be used to identify the language of a document that has been carbon dated to the 15th century. Next they used the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (which is translated into 380 languages) as a sample text to teach the algorithm to identify the original language of a text encrypted with substitution ciphers-which worked-but when they turned the algorithm on the Voynich manuscript, problems began to emerge with some of their underlying assumptions. Kondrak and Hauer wrote an algorithm to identify certain patterns in texts such as how often each letter or combination of letters appears. But scholars are questioning the methodology they used to arrive at this conclusion. In the end, Kondrak and Hauer concluded that the Voynich was originally written in Hebrew. In Decoding Anagrammed Texts Written in an Unknown Language and Script, written by computer science professor Grzegorz Kondrak and graduate student Bradley Hauer of the University of Alberta in Canada, the researchers developed a methodology for finding the source language of ciphered texts and then tested the algorithm they developed on the ancient manuscript. The problem that has confounded researchers for centuries is that nobody knows what language (or alphabet) the document was originally written in. Most scholars agree that the manuscript is written in a substation cipher, a simple code in which certain letters of the alphabet are interspersed with made-up ones. Scholars and Voynich experts quickly sought to set the record straight, expressing doubts over the accuracy of the research methodology applied in the 2016 paper that claimed to have cracked the ancient puzzle. But it turns out that the content of the cryptic 600-year-old, 240-page document-written in a language nobody has ever seen before or since-may still be a mystery. Last month, some remarkable news surfaced: the fabled Voynich manuscript had finally been decoded by artificial intelligence. ![]()
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