Voynich marathon
Posted: Wed Oct 25, 2023 3:07 am
Hi,
I'm an amateur VMS aficionado, I've been following various mail lists and forums about the Voynich manuscript for at least 10 years I think. About two years ago when I needed some toy project to learn new IT skills, I decided to work a bit on statistical analysis of Voynichese, so that's been my weekend hobby since then.
About a month ago I had one week to myself, so I spent it on making sense of the pattern on f67r2 and wrote the following text about some of my findings: https://github.com/oshfdk/f67r2planets/ ... /README.md
Encouraged by the result, I decided to start a self-imposed Voynich marathon, my goal is to write a new Voynich-related text every week, until I run out of ideas or until the manuscript is decoded.
So far, there have been two follow up texts, one discussing distance based ciphers as described in Vignère's "Traicté des chiffres ou Secrètes" and later books, and their applicability to the Voynich manuscript: https://github.com/oshfdk/f67r2planets/ ... istance.md
And one text where I ponder about what it means for texts to be meaningful and whether we can use statistical properties of the Voynich manuscript (cipher-)text to assess the presence of meaning: https://github.com/oshfdk/f67r2planets/ ... meaning.md
Now I'm writing the fourth text, called "Cracking the code", where I'll try to apply some modern computational methods to some of the findings I discuss in my first three texts, in an attempt to identify properties of the Voynich encoding scheme (if there is some encoding scheme, I have no definite proof so far). I won't be using AI, though, solving Voynich with AI is akin to solving one mystery by creating an even bigger mystery, I don't like this approach.
I'm not a professional historian, linguist or mathematician and I have no experience working in academia, so please don't expect a very rigorous approach from my texts, but I try being open minded and following some coherent line of argument.
If you like my texts, you can also subscribe to my Twitter: https://twitter.com/oshfdk I post there almost daily, with some minor updates and musings related to my Voynich marathon.
I would like to thank everyone in the global Voynich community, all people creating and curating fascinating and thought-provoking essays, papers, sites, blog posts and participating in discussions. I hope you will like my contribution.
I'm an amateur VMS aficionado, I've been following various mail lists and forums about the Voynich manuscript for at least 10 years I think. About two years ago when I needed some toy project to learn new IT skills, I decided to work a bit on statistical analysis of Voynichese, so that's been my weekend hobby since then.
About a month ago I had one week to myself, so I spent it on making sense of the pattern on f67r2 and wrote the following text about some of my findings: https://github.com/oshfdk/f67r2planets/ ... /README.md
Encouraged by the result, I decided to start a self-imposed Voynich marathon, my goal is to write a new Voynich-related text every week, until I run out of ideas or until the manuscript is decoded.
So far, there have been two follow up texts, one discussing distance based ciphers as described in Vignère's "Traicté des chiffres ou Secrètes" and later books, and their applicability to the Voynich manuscript: https://github.com/oshfdk/f67r2planets/ ... istance.md
And one text where I ponder about what it means for texts to be meaningful and whether we can use statistical properties of the Voynich manuscript (cipher-)text to assess the presence of meaning: https://github.com/oshfdk/f67r2planets/ ... meaning.md
Now I'm writing the fourth text, called "Cracking the code", where I'll try to apply some modern computational methods to some of the findings I discuss in my first three texts, in an attempt to identify properties of the Voynich encoding scheme (if there is some encoding scheme, I have no definite proof so far). I won't be using AI, though, solving Voynich with AI is akin to solving one mystery by creating an even bigger mystery, I don't like this approach.
I'm not a professional historian, linguist or mathematician and I have no experience working in academia, so please don't expect a very rigorous approach from my texts, but I try being open minded and following some coherent line of argument.
If you like my texts, you can also subscribe to my Twitter: https://twitter.com/oshfdk I post there almost daily, with some minor updates and musings related to my Voynich marathon.
I would like to thank everyone in the global Voynich community, all people creating and curating fascinating and thought-provoking essays, papers, sites, blog posts and participating in discussions. I hope you will like my contribution.