![]() ![]() At least, Kondrak’s and Hauer’s method delivers a result: Hebrew is the language that fits best. This experiment can only be successful if the Voynich Manuscript was encrypted with a MASC – which is far from clear. In the last chapter of their paper, Kondrak and Hauer apply their solution method to the Voynich Manuscript. As can be read in the abstract above, their current paper improves their algorithmic decipherment techniques by introducing new methods for determining the cleartext language. I haven’t read it yet, but it looks quite interesting. As described on this blog before, Hill Climbing has been used for this purpose with great success.īefore Kondrak and Hauer published the paper mentioned above, they co-authored a scientific article about algorithmic decipherment of mono-alphabetical substitution ciphers (MASCs). In the scientific magazine, Cryptologia a number of articles have been published about it (referred to as “automated cryptoanalysis”). In fact, algorithmic decipherment (i.e., letting a computer break an encrypted text without a human interfering) is a very interesting topic. Finally, we report the results on the Voynich manuscript, an unsolved fifteenth century cipher, which suggest Hebrew as the language of the document. It obtains the average decryption word accuracy of 93% on a set of 50 ciphertexts in 5 languages. We then present an approach to decoding anagrammed substitution ciphers, in which the letters within words have been arbitrarily transposed. The best method achieves 97% accuracy on 380 languages. We propose three methods for determining the source language of a document enciphered with a monoalphabetic substitution cipher. The first step in the decipherment process is the identification of the encrypted language. What they did is well described in the abstract of their paper:Īlgorithmic decipherment is a prime example of a truly unsupervised problem. To be fair, Kondrak and Hauer don’t claim to have solved the Voynich Manuscript (the Fox News headline “15th-century manuscript with ‘alien’ characters finally decoded” is therefore nonsense). Their paper “Decoding Anagrammed Texts Written in an Unknown Language and Script” appeared in Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4, Issue 1). The two presented their research at the Association for Computational Linguistics Conference 2017. ![]() Luckily, there’s also a scientific publication. Where was it published? As mentioned above, there are a number of press reports about Kondrak’s and Hauer’s solution.Others have claimed that the language underlying this mysterious text is Latin, Greek, English, German, Italian, Armenian or Arabic – just to name a few. I don’t know if this is a new hypothesis. What? The two researchers say that the manuscript was written in Hebrew.This background gives me hope that their work is not complete crap. Both are into computer science with a focus on NLP (no, this is not Neuro-linguistic Programming, but Natural Language Processing). Who? The new alleged solution stems from Professor Greg Kondrak and graduate student Bradley Hauer from the University of Alberta, Canada. ![]() Here are the most important facts about it: There must be at least 50, maybe even more.Īccording to reports by Fox News, The Daily Mail and others, yet another Voynich Manusript solution (or at least a solution approach) has been put forward recently (thanks to blog reader George Keller for the hint). To be honest, I don’t know how many solutions of the Voynich Manusript have been published over the last decades. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |