"There are no saints or crosses, not even in the cosmological sections," the doctor said. Skinner proved his theory on another unconditional evidence: there is a lack of Christian symbolism in the manuscript. "The grammar, spelling, and vocabulary would have been quite different, especially for a manuscript like the Voynich that is scientific in nature," Davis said. Many of them are questioning the methodology Kondrak and Hauer used to arrive at their conclusion.įor instance, Lisa Fagin Davis, executive director of the Medieval Academy of America, says that an algorithm trained to identify modern languages cannot reliably be used to identify the language of the 15th-century script. Scholars are reluctant to validate his new findings though. Kondrak explained that the full meaning of the Voynich manuscript will remain a mystery without historians of ancient Hebrew. With help of the computer algorithms and Google Translate scientists read the first sentence: "She made recommendations to the priest, man of the house and me and people."Kondrak agrees that "it's a kind of strange sentence to start a manuscript but it definitely makes sense." Scientists also decoded 72 words in one section that fit in a botanical pharmacopoeia including words like "farmer," "light," "air" and "fire." The scientists found that letters in each word had been reordered and vowels had been dropped. The result yielded the hypothesis that the manuscript was written in Hebrew. Then, they came up with a computer program using a series of complex statistical procedures and algorithms to identify the correct language up to 97 per cent of the time, and used it for the Voynich code. They took the "United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights" translated into 380 different languages as a sample text and taught the computer algorithm to identify the original language of a text encrypted with substitution ciphers. So, computing science professor Greg Kondrak and his co-author, graduate student Bradley Hauer, decided to try to find out what the strange language the script is written in. Computing labs where he works had already developed software that beat professional players at Texas Hold 'Em, one of the most complex types of poker. His statement was not a mere rhetoric one. Two months ago, some remarkable news surfaced: the enigmatic Voynich manuscript had finally been decoded by artificial intelligence!Greg Kondrak of the Canadian University of Alberta’s renowned artificial intelligence lab was one of those who thought that the powerful computer programs could help in decoding the script: "I was intrigued and thought I could contribute something new." Today, Voynich manuscript is housed at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in New Haven, Connecticut, and its high resolution version has been available online for years. It surfaced last century when several manuscripts from a Jesuit library in Italy was purchased in 1912 by a rare-book dealer Wilfrid Voynich, who has started looking for someone to translate the cipher script. Manuscript ownership can be traced back to the early 17th century. Well, there are some who even have speculated it was written by aliens. The authorship of the manuscript is still questioned and has led to heated debate "Who is responsible for the manuscript?", with characters as varied as John Dee (1527−1609), an English mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, occult philosopher and Queen Elizabeth I’s scientific advisor, and renowned Leonardo da Vinci (1452−1519) being posited as its authors. Others retort in return: where has he dug up those 246 precious pages? Although some experts made allegations that Voynich had faked the book, using old vellum pages. Until present, the only accurate data scholars obtained was that the script’s vellum and ink has been carbon dated to between 14.
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