Re:Multispectral Imaging and the Voynich Manuscript
by alganet on Tuesday September 10, 2024 @08:46PM
(#41507133)
Morse, ASCII and military phonetic transcribed literally (just to cite a non-machine one) all look like repetitive gibberish if you don't know what to look for.
Re:Multispectral Imaging and the Voynich Manuscript
by jcranmer on Tuesday September 10, 2024 @10:36PM
(#41507555)
Morse, ASCII, and military phonetic are all pretty recognizable as single-unit substitution ciphers. We've pretty much ruled out any possibility of it being a single-unit substitution cipher of any known language.
Re:Multispectral Imaging and the Voynich Manuscript
by nkoren on Wednesday September 11, 2024 @05:33AM
(#41509686)
> some degree of plausibility for a would-be cryptanalyst
But that's a very ahistorical theory, isn't it? The manuscript was written hundreds of years before cryptanalysts were invented. For its author to anticipate that would have required an impossible degree of foresight. Rather, whatever features give it cryptographically interesting properties must have been motivated by something other than a desire to confuse/intrigue cryptanalysts, with that just being a coincidental side-effect.
Re:Multispectral Imaging and the Voynich Manuscript
by throwaway48540 on Wednesday September 11, 2024 @01:16PM
(#41513387)
Of course not, there were scholars focused on analyzing and decrypting encrypted texts in Roman Empire and probably earlier.
Re:Multispectral Imaging and the Voynich Manuscript
by tptacek on Wednesday September 11, 2024 @05:25PM
(#41515475)
Monoalphabetic ciphers are commonly referred to as "Caesar ciphers"... because Caesar used them.
Presumably the concept of a coded message followed pretty rapidly after the invention of the written message.
It's also known that the text makes no sense as an encipherment known in the 17th century of any known natural language. Statistical analysis of features suggests it's not random gibberish... but also distinguish it from natural language. It's also prone to a high degree of repetition or near-repetition (think phrases like "burgle bugle bugie", with one-letter changes between successive words).
Personally, I think it's gibberish that was constructed to have some degree of plausibility for a would-be cryptanalyst. Or maybe even something as prosaically simple as calligraphy practice, given the unnaturally repetitive nature of a lot of the text.