However, the important bit is that we finally have something understandable from the most intriguing puzzle of recent times. Yeah, that’s a strange way to start an even stranger 240-page manuscript. “She made recommendations to the priest, man of the house and me and people.” But after a few spelling corrections, Google translate was able to convert the sentence into something recognisable in English. Unfortunately, the sentence still didn’t make any sense. “It turned out that over 80 percent of the words were in a Hebrew dictionary, but we didn’t know if they made sense together,” Kondrak said.įinally deciphering the first line in the manuscript, kondrak and Hauer took it to Moshe Koppel, a colleague with computer science expertise as well as a native Hebrew speaker. Of course, this was much easier to test now they knew the manuscript was in Hebrew and could test the supposed alphagrams against real Hebrew words. For instance, INDIATIMES, would be written as ADEIIIMNST. An alphagram is an anagram of a word, but with the letters put in alphabetical order. Next, the two decided to try out one hypothesis mentioned by previous researchers, that the document was encoded by writing it with alphagrams. “And just saying ‘this is Hebrew’ is the first step. “That was surprising,” said Kondrak in a statement. Though they had wondered if the text was encrypted from Arabic, it turns out the document is actually written in Hebrew. After that, they set the AI to examining patterns in the Voynich manuscript, and it turned up something they didn’t expect. The two trained a neural network on the text of the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights”, seeing as it has translations in 380 different languages. With the help of his grad student Bradley Hauer, Kondrak began the first step, that of figuring out the language of the text, before it was encoded. After all, if there was a pattern to discover underneath all the confusion, machine learning would be able to find it. To him, this was the perfect task to delegate to an artificial intelligence. That’s when Greg Kondrak, an expert in natural language processing at the University of Alberta, comes in. Some have even gone so far as to suggest it’s indecipherable because it’s all an elaborate hoax.
It also doesn't help that there's no known history about the book, because it dates all the way back to the fifteenth century.īecause of this, the Voynich manuscript is considered the Holy Grail of cryptography, an un-crackable code that has resisted efforts to decipher it for decades, going back to during the Second World War. And while some illustrations suggest astronomical symbols, or biology diagrams, they’re not much help either. Not only is it coded in an unfamiliar pattern, it’s also a language no one recognises, making decrypting it doubly hard. The manuscript gets its name from Wilfrid Voynich, the Polish book dealer who first obtained it in 1912. Now, we’ve got our first real lead on the document’s history thanks to the power of artificial intelligence. In fact, no one is even sure of where it was written and by whom or what language it’s in. With its 240 pages of coded script and puzzling illustrations, the manuscript’s meaning has remained hidden all these. Images courtesy: Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University Since it was first discovered more than a century ago, the Voynich manuscript has excited and confounded historians, linguists, and cryptographers.