Secret Knowledge – or a Hoax? | Hacker News Reader

Secret Knowledge – or a Hoax?

nybooks.com

50 pointsVigier29 comments

The definite way it talks about the herbal section towards the end of the article is unfounded. Some of the herbal has in fact been the key to an attempt to translate a few words in recent years.

It may be hoax, it may not. But declaring "the plants in the book's herbal section never did and never could exist in nature" is nonsense.

Not all pages depict impossible plants and the drawings themselves may be highly derived, second or third hand illustrations.

IMHO it's unlikely to be a hoax due to the expense of such a hoax at the time, and I understand language patterm analysis looks about right - i.e. if it's a hoax it is a damn clever one and seems to defeat methods of analysis far ahead of its time.

Either way I doubt it contains the secret knowledge of the ancients.

--edit-- In fact inconsistency and weirdness in medieval manuscripts is really not evidence of a hoax to me - evidence they got things wrong, evidence of magical and mythical thinking, sure. But not specifically of a hoax.

I'm not sure that "hoax" is the right word for it. The vellum's been radiocarbon dated to early 15th century, and the illustrations suggest a similar time period. So that rules out a hoax.

The question is whether the text contains any meaningful encoded information, or is completely meaningless.

Well, it rules out a more recent hoax. I would consider a book produced in the early 15th century that deliberately contained.nothing of use to be something of a hoax. A magician's prop, for instance.

There's another question of whether, even if information was once encoded in there, it is recoverable. Either because of some sort of hash-like function applied to the data, or just because there's not enough to go on.

It's certainly intriguing.

Some prominent forgeries have used both old media with old ink. Radiocarbon dating only proves the age of a substance, it doesn't prove when ink was applied to paper.

It was referred to in a letter written in 1639: http://www.voynich.nu/letters.html

I've recently carried out a through statistical analysis of the text and concluded that it's almost certainly meaningless, and have figured out how the text could have been generated.

I'll start a new thread ... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14091216)

On a brief scan that looks hideously complicated and more than a little like extracting a property of some text and the being surprised that when you replay you get something similar. Can you say that your technique, when applied to any and all natural languages, absolutely does not do something similar?

I'm not sure many people are going to buy it.

I had that thought myself. Briefly, my theory is that the different parts of the text were generated using state transition tables. The actual weights on the transitions are arbitrary, and can only be determined by reverse engineering the original manuscript.

Only one (physical) table needs to be generated at first, but the values of the transition weights do need to be changed as the scribe proceeds through the manuscript.

Could it be used for English? I doubt it. The morphology of English and other Indo-European languages is too complex to for a reasonably-sized state machine to realistically generate.

Maybe for something more regular such as Pinyin Mandarin or Yale Cantonese BUT the output wouldn't fool anyone who knows those languages, and a linguist who had never seen them before would very quickly become suspicious - no discernable word order, common words repeated several times in a row.

Well it's certainly another interesting hypothesis, I wouldn't be ready to call it quite yet though!

Some people with schizophrenia invent their own languages and alphabets, and their speech can seem randomly generated in severe cases. Or an alchemist might have been exposed to chemicals that caused schizophrenic symptoms. I wonder if the statistics would be similar.

While it's still worth testing that, my understanding is that it's very difficult for anyone to think up values indistinguishable from random, and this appears to be what we're dealing with here.

What I'm proposing is that the words we see are the output of a random process, but that their order appears to be random, in the statistical sense. However, everyone who's studied the text agrees that the glyph distribution within words conforms to a well-defined syntax, and there are significant differences between different parts of the text. My theory explains these.

Of course, a well-designed cipher will appear to be random, and the input to the text generation process appears to be just that, but the problem is that there's no way of subsequently decrypting the text, as information (in the mathematical sense, as well as the everyday sense) would be lost.

If you are familiar with the Voynich Manuscript, there is no new information in this article. My lay theory is that it was an art project by some bored monk, or someone who wrote those types of books had dementia or something that allowed his motor skills to operate, but the mind was gone. Either that or aliens.

did you see this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhtZc-nFNt0 (watch part 1 and 2 for the details)

He convinced me at least :)

He kinda takes off where Stephen Bax left it, but also uncovers some methodical errors of Bax.

Fantastic. I believe it really is a language. I hope it gets translated soon.

His linguistic analysis shows that the book was written in a dialect of the language of the Gypsies, aka the Roma People, nomads who slowly migrated from India, through the Middle East, to Europe starting 1500 years ago. This is why the language contains elements from so many language groups, and no one can figure it out. It is probably some sort of reference book they kept with them as it contains star charts and plant descriptions.

I'm surprised though, that no old roma stumbled upon it and recognised the language or anything. It sounds like someone speaking their language could speed up translations tremedously :).

I read up on the Roma on Wikipedia after seeing the video, and apparently, they branched off during their migration into several groups. Their language branched off as well, taking on characteristics of their home countries. Wikipedia said the various dialects probably become so distinct, they likely could not understand each other. Eventually, some died out or were assimilated, which could explain your point.

I can't wait until they actually translate it to find out what it is. Maybe they should start with a Roma translator.

I'm pretty sure this guy solved (part of) it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cRlqE3D3RQ

if you want to skip the basics jump right in to part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nHbImkFKE4

He kinda takes off where Stephen Bax left it, but also uncovers some methodical errors of Bax.

I'd be very interested in what someone who knows a bit more about this than me thinks of this.

edit: short version in his update: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhtZc-nFNt0

The Internet self publishing phenomenon informs us that there is no shortage of lunatics in the world willing to crank out pages and pages of gibberish.

This is just the old school version of someone's rambling blog or kooky Usenet postings.

Or it could be a Lorem ipsum intended to demonstrate someone's typesetting services. "I can take your manuscript and make these types of illustrations with this style of text flowing around them for this kind of general look. Oh, don't try to read the text, it's just gibberish for illustrative purposes."

Inventing a whole new alphabet for your typesetting demo is going a bit far...

Also it's not typeset, it's handwritten.

Looking at the example page they provided (slight NSFW warning, there's crudely drawn nudes present):

http://www.nybooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/duffy_2-04...

That's the first time I've ever looked at the pages closely, and man does that just look like a couple of nonsense words repeated fairly frequently, with slight variations.

Looks like a lorem ipsum web mockup to me. Maybe was an early equivalent of a sales pitch for the author's skills. Just seems like odd features like the fold-out pages, sketches of plants and nudes to combine in one unless the sole purpose was basically marketing.

Can't wait for 100 years from now people trying to read meaning into all the various lorem variations combined with kitten placeholder images out there. "This culture revolved around mysterious repeated verses praising the juvenile feline in all its forms."

This would be a completely impractical way of "marketing", though. Surely an author could use real words (or at least real characters like Lorem Ipsum) for that. And why would he fill a whole manuscript?

You might try to see if it's come kind of contextual speedwriting. I learned a version of speedwriting in college in which the letter "e" and the letter "i" are exactly the same and deduced later by context; likewise, the letter "h" and the letters "la" appear to be the same. In other words, it might be more of a crude symbolic code. Just a thought.

For those interested in Terence McKenna, I highly recommend his lecture on the Voynich Manuscript:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTBOaaeTxm8

Terence McKenna, he of the DMT induced Machine elves :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THa7kpuVwO4

The Voynich Manuscript!

Here it is for your perusal : https://archive.org/details/TheVoynichManuscript

Mandatory XKCD: [1]

[1] https://xkcd.com/593/

this article is really rambling. I don't need to know the entire history of the manuscript and all the characters involved in its movement to pick up on the intrigue of the story.

Compared to some articles about the book it's not the worst.

It's also an interest piece, rather than normal news. So the editor will let things slide.

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