A unique code that uses playing cards and dice to convert language into glyphs produces text that is eerily similar to the glyphs in the Voynich Manuscript, new research has revealed. This discovery suggests that equivalent codes may have been used to create mysterious medieval manuscripts.
The new code, called “naibe” after the name of a 14th-century Italian card game, cannot decipher the medieval Voynich manuscript, but it does provide an idea of how the manuscript was created.
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Science journalist Michael Greshko investigated how the manuscript came together in a new study published November 26 in the journal Cryptologia. He told Live Science that he got the idea for the Knybe cipher while researching stories about the Voynich manuscript. “It’s this fascinating and mysterious medieval artifact,” he said.
Naive begins by rolling a die and using the numbers rolled to divide the Italian or Latin block into single and double letters. So “gatto” (“cat” in Italian) can be “g”, “at”, or “to”. The cipher then uses the draw of the playing cards to determine which of six different tables should be used to encode the letters into “Voinicheese.” This is a strange undeciphered glyph that appears to be grouped into words in the manuscript. The table is “weighted” by the number of corresponding cards, ensuring that the statistical occurrence of the pseudo-Voynichese glyphs is the same as that seen in the manuscript itself.
Greshko’s effort is one of the major attempts to explain how the manuscript was created. However, he said it is still not an exact replica of Voyniches’ text, but only an approximation.
mysterious manuscript
The Voynich Manuscript is named after Polish, British, and American book collector Wilfrid Voynich, who acquired it in 1912 from a collection compiled by a Jesuit university near Rome. It is currently housed at Yale University.
This manuscript is currently at the juncture of attempts to understand the lost language, but experts are not even entirely sure whether Voynichese is real.
In all seriousness, there are theories that the manuscript is a medieval hoax, with suitably mystical and sordid pictures, and that the Voynichese glyph text is completely meaningless.
The hoax theory has grown stronger in recent years, as attempts to crack Voynichese have increased in recent years, some using machine learning and other computerized artificial intelligence techniques, but none have been able to crack the code, even if it existed.
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However, the theory that Voyniches is based on a real language and can be broken remains strong, and Greshko’s Knybe cipher is one of the closest attempts yet.
The pseudo-Voignycheese output of the Kniebe cipher has several important similarities with the real Voynycheese, including the statistical frequency of glyphs, the length of Voynycheese “words,” and certain rules of the manuscript’s mysterious grammar.
These similarities suggest that similar techniques were used to create the original Voynich manuscript, Greshko said. “The Knaibe cipher is almost certainly not the way the manuscript was created,” he said. “But what it does provide is a fully documented way to reliably go back and forth between Latin and something that behaves like the Voynich Manuscript.”
cryptographic technology
Dice and playing cards were chosen as the sources of randomness, Greshko said, because it was essential that the cryptography be “feasible to perform by hand” with the technology of the time. At one point I thought about taking a token out of my bag like a bingo caller, but then I realized that playing cards were known in Europe at the time.
He also said that while the Knybe cipher does not faithfully reproduce all the characteristics of Voyniches (such as the exact frequency of the words in Voyniches and where they appear in lines and paragraphs), discrepancies could be analyzed for potential connections.
“My hope is that this will be adopted as a computational benchmark,” Greshko said. “Differences between the cipher and the manuscript may indicate how the text was actually created.”
Rene Zandbergen, a former satellite engineer who is not directly involved in Greshko’s work but is a noted expert on the Voynich manuscript, said he appreciated Greshko’s efforts to develop an encoding method to approximate Voynich.
But Greshko “also makes clear that he is not suggesting that the manuscript text was generated in this way,” Zandbergen said in an email. “He’s just demonstrating that such a way can be found, and we might assume that there might be other ways.”
Zandbergen added that it is “essentially impossible to tell” whether Voyniches’ text is meaningful or a hoax.
“Some people argue, ‘No one would do that,’ but I think that argument is too simplistic,” he said. “What’s even more problematic is that it’s very hard to imagine how that could have happened.”
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