The Voynich Ninja

Linda, you provided a lot of information and insight. The idea of the VM being a template document for the production of other documents is certainly reasonable. Clever, I think. Wouldn't it be lovely if a derivative document could be traced back to the VM. We certainly have herbology and astrology as salable products. 

Are you thinking the key was lost or discarded because the information in the manuscript became unmarketable, or was it something more mundane. I suppose there are a dozen ways the key could go missing including slipping out of the book.

Some astute person or AI will eventually find something not quite right in the astronomy/astrology section and cross reference it to an earlier or later publication showing the identical error. This certainly supports the VM as template idea. It may, by a different turn, show the VM to have plagiarized the work of others, a good reason to encrypt it. Too bad it is not a mathematical work, it would be all told by now.

The nymphs...are certainly motherly in appearance. Since they are so widespread, I think they are space filling doodles intending to elicit a smile.There is nothing profound about them and they can not be said, after all these years to be anything more that what little painted cherubs are in holy books, space fillers.

(16-12-2024, 11:53 PM)GlennM Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Would you say that making an unreadable book and selling it with a cipher key was common back then? Tjere is not much sense in writing one book and selling multiple copies of the key. It makes little sense for the owner to transcribe the key and keep it with the book.It seems dicey. 

The VM may be put together like a pocket reference book, but it makes little sense to be one. An encrypted volume means that the key is kept elsewhere and the two need to be brought together, at least once. I would think that once decrypted, the owner would put in readable margin notes. That way, even if the book was taken and the key left at home, there would be something to jog the memory.

The VM does not appear to be refined enough, nor important enough to to be some sort occult work.

Finally, if the manuscript required a key to decypher, can you imagine the when the buyer decodes the text and it disappoints.

I don't think so, and I don't think anyone said that or would say that. Plus you don't need a key if you know how it works already. That is why I think it is a personal (or familial) encoded template. The owner doesn't need to make notes, the owner is likely the encryptor and it was probably meant for their own use. Later finders of it, after all who understood it were gone might have sold it, but I don't think the makers did. There are all sorts of mnemonics, like scorpion tails on plants that probably mean the plant will sting you...to jog the memory. Since the mnemonics were employed by the makers, it would take little to jog their memory, whereas someone else might not even know a mnemonic had been employed at all, which would be the intended result.

I'm not sure VMS was a commercial project, exactly for the reasons you listed. I agree with Linda that it's much easier to see it in the context of an experimental, personal or community (cult, sect) creation.

(16-12-2024, 11:53 PM)GlennM Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The VM may be put together like a pocket reference book, but it makes little sense to be one. An encrypted volume means that the key is kept elsewhere and the two need to be brought together, at least once. I would think that once decrypted, the owner would put in readable margin notes. That way, even if the book was taken and the key left at home, there would be something to jog the memory.

I don't think I understand why your interpretation of the "key" is so specific. Depending on how the manuscript is encoded, "the key" could be anything from a big volume of codes or a specific device to a very basic principle that is easy to remember.

For example, the following is a simple way of encoding a text of any length in almost any language or script. If I'm not mistaken, something similar was mentioned in Traicté des chiffres ou Secrètes by Blaise Vigenère (1586).

The ciphertext:

AGH BH CADEDG CADFDGIG AG CBDFHG CBDHIF BAHFB CAGIC ABDHGA

The key is the following block of letters:

ABC
DEF
GHI

Each ciphertext word is a plaintext letter, encoded as a shape. You put your pen over the key block at the point indicated by the first letter of the ciphertext word and then trace straight lines through the points in the sequence of letters until you hit a ciphertext space. Then you start tracing the next letter. 

For example, A-G-H is an L shape staring from A, moving down to G and then to the right to H. There are several possible ways of encoding each letter by shifting of modifying the shape or scale, you can encode L as A-G-I, B-E-F, B-H-I, etc. 

If we extend the key horizontally or vertically, we can have a verbose cipher that would be fairly hard to break, unless you know the underlying principle and the key block. However, remembering/reconstructing the key is very easy, if it's as simple as above, you should only remember that it's 3x3 characters and they are written alphabetically in the natural left to right, top to bottom direction. With this cipher you can represent letters of various alphabets and arbitrary symbols, especially if you use a larger 4x4 or 5x5 block. You certainly have no problem with "leaving the key at home" or explaining the principle to anyone in under 5 minutes, but without the explanation the cipher is not very easy to break.

If you want to test how hard it is, here is a simple ciphertext encoded in a very similar fashion using exactly the same 3x3 block with the same letters ordered in the same way (I'm making the task as easy as possible), but with a small twist that is just as easy to explain and remember.

DGHEIFBD GICEA BDEF BICEH EHE DEBE BCEGIAB CIHEGH

Will one be able to decode it easily? (Update, I've changed the above ciphertext two times when editing this post, all three versions are correct, I just realized both times when editing that there was a simpler and shorter way to encode parts of the message.)

I don't know how exactly one was supposed to read the actual VMS, but my bet would be on a simple method like this rather than a huge book of codes or a lengthy cipher.

(16-12-2024, 11:53 PM)GlennM Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The VM does not appear to be refined enough, nor important enough to to be some sort occult work.

As far as I understand, it seems to be somewhat crudely (yet skillfully) made in certain aspects, compared to some famous contemporary works.

But I'm not sure at all what you mean by "nor important enough".

The great white hope is artificial intelligence, perhaps not now, but in time. I have my opinion about the validity of the document as do all forum participants. Thankfully, the forum is spared of ad hominum attacks, much to the credit of the group. What I believe a mature AI bot could do is pair the different codex encription solutions with the various extant and extinct languages in order to come up with a readable translation key. Human investigators have tried this, but I think the areas to be consolidated are too broad.  A language expert may not necessarily be a decryption expert, no disrespect intended.

Since a picture is worth a thousand words, we could skip the language analysis and seek a match for the VM astrological drawings reproduced elsewhere with readable text. That text could be the key to Voynichese. Again, AI to the rescue.

That's an interesting type of encryption, being an alternative procedure compared to any type of substitution variations.

How can obfuscation be increased? Does complexity increase obscurity? Substitution cyphers do have a range of complexity. However, they cannot be combined to make a more complex system. If A=B and B=C, then A=C, and there is no advantage.

The lesson of the VMs cosmic construction is that this is a pairing of two cosmic elements that are totally diverse. And if the parts cannot be identified for what they are, then the lesson is not learned.

Complexity can be greatly increased by the combination of two totally diverse systems of encryption. More than double the fun.

Regarding mnemonics. Identification and correct terminology are important. In heraldic canting, language is critical. There is also the matter of historical grounding. If historical details are unfamiliar, then their VMs replicas will be irrelevant. Do 'Bendy, argent et azure' and a red galero mean anything? See VMs White Aries.

Yes, I think image matching of any of the astronomical images to the same in other documents might be the royal road to cracking the VM code. If the VM is a template document used in the family business of reproductions of rinformation within the VM, surely any other replica of the VM astrological charts will be readable in the buyer's language.

It is clear that for all the effort, nobody is going to translate the script until a Rosetta Stone is found. I feel it has to be from the astrological imagery duplicated and translated in other works.. Anybody have a spare Cray computer to lend? It makes me womder if the National Science Foundation would even entertain making a grant to buy time on a supercomputer.

(19-12-2024, 02:53 AM)GlennM Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Anybody has a spare Cray computer?

No supercomputer is going to help. Computers are dumb and need people to program them to do the task. And this is the problem. What programs are you proposing? Many serious attempts at decipherment have already been tried, by many people and they have all failed.  Almost every possible statistic has already been examined, tabulated, correlated and analyzed, sometimes using deep computational algorithms.

(19-12-2024, 10:15 AM)dashstofsk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Many serious attempts at decipherment have already been tried...

Serious, maybe, but was it complete?

(19-12-2024, 01:49 PM)Ruby Novacna Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.was it complete?

No. No-one seems to have deciphered. Claims to have done so seem to be lacking credibility

And this last comment makes me want to circle back to my original idea of fakery. If the manuscript is a collection of unobtainable plants written about in an idiosyncratic script, then nobody can do anything other than ponder the meaning of it. And that is the point! The manusript is an entertainment, a whimsy, not a working document. Its purpose is to stimulate curiosity, wonder, amusement and the promise that decipherment will reveal arcane wisdom. It is just the thing for a bored king to puzzle over, provided he buys the book.Why not, knowing the elixer of life, fertility and happiness is a strong draw and worth the price of the book.