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AI Potentially Deciphers Voynich Manuscript

posted by Fnord666 on Sunday January 28 2018, @01:49PM   
from the augmented-intelligence dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Greg Kondrak, a computer scientist from University of Alberta's AI lab, claims to have begun decoding the mystery behind the unknown text with his novel algorithm, CTVNews reported.

[...] It is believed that the manuscript is somehow related to women's health but there is no solid clue, according to the report. People have made wild guesses regarding the code, with at least eight making firm claims – only to be debunked later on.

Kondark, however, took a different approach towards solving the problem – artificial intelligence. "Once you see it, once you find out the mystery, this is a natural human tendency to solve the puzzle," the computer scientist told CTVNews. "I was intrigued and thought I could contribute something new."

He and his co-author Bradley Hauer combined novel AI algorithms with statistical procedures to identify and translate the language. The approach, which had been used to translate United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 380 languages, came in handy and suggested the language was Hebrew, albeit with critical tweaks.

They found that the letters in every word had been reordered and the vowels were dropped in the code. The first complete sentence which the AI decrypted read, "She made recommendations to the priest, man of the house and me and people." One section of the text carries words that translate into "farmer", "light", "air", and "fire".

The translated line could be the starting of something big but it is a long way to go for Kondark, who stresses on the need of complementary human assistance. However, it is not clear how accurate the translation really is.

"Somebody with very good knowledge of Hebrew and who's a historian at the same time could take this evidence and follow this kind of clue," he said while highlighting the need of someone who could make sense of the translated text.

For those who may not be familiar with the manuscript, see Voynich Manuscript at Wikipedia, or read it yourself at archive.org (Javascript required).

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Original Submission

• Re:Use on UNDHC is irrelevant, other issues Re:Use on UNDHC is irrelevant, other issues (Score: 4, Interesting) by zocalo on Sunday January 28 2018, @03:48PM (2 children)

  by zocalo (302) on Sunday January 28 2018, @03:48PM (#629476)

  I guess that depends on what they meant by being "in Hebrew", since the manuscript obviously isn't actually written in the Hebrew script but one unique to the document. It could be that the AI suggested "Hebrew" based on the breakdown of symbols counts, which are adjacent to which, etc., but it could also be one level abstracted from that and be based more on sentence structure, e.g. if you were to give a compilation of Yoda's sayings to analyse then it *should* come back with Japanese, even though they were actually spoken in English. People have done such analysiys on the manuscript before and the general consensus seems to be that there's a method behind the madness and it's not just random gibberish (it might still be well structured gibberish though), so it may well be as simple as taking the sentence structure of one language, writing it down word for word in another, then using some kind of substitution cypher to turn it into the Voynich script.
  
  Given the number of possible permutations though, I'm not holding out much hope that this analysis has got the right combination.

  --
  UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!

  Parent

  Starting Score:	1		point
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  Interesting=2, Total=2
  Extra 'Interesting' Modifier		0
  Karma-Bonus Modifier		+1
  Total Score:		4

• Re:Use on UNDHC is irrelevant, other issues (Score: 3, Funny) by requerdanos on Sunday January 28 2018, @05:00PM

  by requerdanos (5997) on Sunday January 28 2018, @05:00PM (#629503) Journal

  An "AI" to decode [The Voynich Manuscript | The Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation | Leetspeak | etc. ] ...

  
  # initialize
  if (exist: spaces) {
          delimiter=spaces;
  } else {
          delimiter=random(portion of input);
  }
  # process
  while more_document_exists {
          this_gibberish_word = next_word_until_delimiter();
          this_translated_word = word_this_nonsense_is_mathematically_least_dissimilar_to(this_gibberish_word);
          add_to_output (this_translated_word)
  }
  #enjoy success
  

  I'd be surprised if the AI in TFA differs conceptually by much.

  Parent

• Re:Use on UNDHC is irrelevant, other issues (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Sunday January 28 2018, @09:52PM

  by FatPhil (863) <reversethis-{if.fdsa} {ta} {tnelyos-cp}> on Sunday January 28 2018, @09:52PM (#629593) Homepage

  I was guessing that they came up with a "maybe the vowels are missing?" idea, and then just made a leap to "like hebrew", and ran with it.
  
  But just look at it as a tesselation of symbols, it bears no resemblence in dynamics to hebrew texts - I can't believe it has the same kind of statistical distribution. It looks like poetic latinate text (the amount of repetition would be unusual for prose).

  --
  Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves

  Parent