Computer scientist uncovers clue to deciphering the Voynich manuscript

Here's what I would identify as the main flaw: To identify the language of a centuries-old document, he trained his model on a modern multilingual text -- the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

(A questioner in the audience asked "If you needed a document in hundreds of languages, why didn't you use the Bible?", to which he had no real answer.)

So he ran this somewhat anachronistic model and it told him that the text was a good statistical match for being in... Esperanto. He threw this prediction out on the basis that it makes absolutely no sense. You'd think this would be the first sign that the model did not fit the data.

The #2 prediction was Modern Hebrew, which of course did not exist in the 15th century, so he said "that's close enough to biblical Hebrew" and claimed that as the result.

He asked a Hebrew speaker he knew to decipher a couple of sentences based on the model. The Hebrew speaker could not actually decipher them. The author pressed on and the Hebrew speaker obligingly produced some unsatisfying guesses at sentences, which sound remarkably like sentences from unsuccessful attempts to decipher Linear B texts.

And I don't understand why anyone would so confidently report a modification of the #2-ranked prediction of the model. We might as well go ahead and say "AI confirms: the Voynich Manuscript is in ancient Esperanto!"

The much more realistic interpretation is that the Voynich text matches the statistics of none of the language samples that the model was trained to recognize, and the model is overconfident in the probabilities it outputs.

I think the fact that the method was cool must have been part of the paper's acceptance at ACL. But it does not give us a real answer about the Voynich manuscript.

He only claims to have potentially identified the document's language as a form of Hebrew using a language detection model trained on UN documents. That let him incidentally decipher a few lines by literally typing them into Google Translate, but he doesn't claim to be an expert on Hebrew or have the ability to translate the whole document. He's looking for Hebrew experts to test his theory.

But by the time the story makes it into it's third re-write on a chain of bad news websites, it's "Man claims his AI deciphers unbreakable code that stumped Enigma codebreakers" or whatever.

Even if he's wrong, it's super cool to watch his explanation. It's making so much sense.

I doubt any AI can do better then him here, so much vague clues you have to get to the bottom of and loads of slight matches because it's an old language that only has relatives, but no equivalents today.

While reading the article (which was low quality with a flawed attention-grabbing headline, as others have pointed out), I noticed 3 consecutive articles linked on the right side were for porn-related stories. I don't know too much about the International Business Times, but the name would have made me think it was a relatively upstanding news source. Plus, the .co.uk always adds a bit of extra class for us Americans.

So, I looked the place up on Wikipedia[1]. Here's what I found...

"In late 2011, Google allegedly moved the outlet's articles down in search results in response to excessive search engine optimization activity."

"Reporting in 2014, Mother Jones claimed that IBT journalists are subject to constant demand to produce clickbait; one former employee reportedly complained that management issued 'impossible' demands, including a minimum of 10,000 hits per article, and fired those who couldn't deliver."

And it goes on...

So, yep, pretty much a click-bait factory. No wonder the story is so mangled.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Business_Times

https://xkcd.com/593/