(16-03-2025, 04:01 PM)tavie Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The Zodiac 340 also was known for solveritis, and there are still at least one or two who declare their solution is correct despite it being clearly inferior in every metric to the solution identified by David Oranchak et al
The Zodiac letters are an interesting case in how the first one was cracked by a couple of random amateurs, just by guessing the word "kill" was in the message, and then the next one took 51 years and a team of international wizards with modern technology. The duality of mysterious cryptograms. People come to the Voynich (and I assume came to Zodiac 340) expecting it to be like Zodiac 408, where you can plug in a word and the whole thing unravels. I'm confident that it'll actually be more like Zodiac 340, and require a computer brute forcing thousands of solutions (assuming it has meaning).
(16-03-2025, 03:25 PM)Mark Knowles Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The key is what you mean by the word "obvious".
Really, things are often "obvious" in hindsight. Any "obvious" breakthrough that took a long time to make, wasn't actually that obvious.
(17-03-2025, 09:57 AM)5dd95 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (17-03-2025, 12:31 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view."If I've made the breakthrough in a matter of minutes/hours/days, how come all these people - including expert codebreakers and linguists - labouring over it for decades didn't find it?
What is Tesla's famous quote?
Let the future tell the truth and evaluate each one according to his work and accomplishments
That quote was actually Tavie's statement, but I do agree with its implication.
Note that the answer referring to Tesla has nothing to do with the question.
We have one answer to the question, provided by another would-be solver: Gerard Cheshire.
As many people will remember, his answer was: "lateral thinking and ingenuity".
The real problem is that people simply have no idea how much thinking has already been applied, including lateral and out-of-the box. I know I gravely underestimated it, and that was 25 years ago.
(16-03-2025, 04:01 PM)tavie Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.My point is that breakthroughs are not down to just luck (and genius) alone. I'm struggling to think of anyone who made a great breakthrough or any breakthrough when they were entirely or almost new to the field, especially if they avoided reading all previous literature on the subject. Most Voynich solutions tend to be like that. The initial breakthrough appears very quick, even if some may hang around for a while developing their system.
When you talk about there being many research avenues to explore that could have been overlooked or insufficiently studied, that's exactly what I meant by medium-high or higher hanging fruit. I'm sure there are plenty of those still left to discover with both study and a bit of luck. But that is not what we are talking about here. We are talking about the kind of breakthrough that is usually made by someone relatively new to the manuscript within hours or at best days of looking at the manuscript. I can't believe such low-hanging fruits exist.
Maybe we are talking at cross-purposes.
From my recollection it is not uncommon for people to imply that behaviour relating to the Voynich manuscript is unusual whereas it seems to me to be part of a general phenomenon. This is why it is often argued that whilst prizes might be appropriate for solving other problems Voynich research attracts crazies where other problems don't.
There were two schoolgirls in America who recently discovered a trigonometric proof of pythagoras theorem. If someone were to stumble upon by chance a document in an archive or library that had great significance for the understanding of the Voynich manuscript then that would not surprise me. There have been many independent researchers who have made significant contributions over many years. Ramanujan comes to mind.
Then one asks how long one has to be studying the Voynich for before one can make such a breakthrough? Months/Years/Decades? It took me months to construct my theory of the rosettes folio and that was when I first started to research the Voynich, a number of years ago, was that sufficient time? Of course, I have built on this theory over a number of years through research primarily into early 15th century cryptography and my initial theory took as a start Nick Pelling's theory of the rosettes folio.
(18-03-2025, 01:15 PM)Mark Knowles Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.From my recollection it is not uncommon for people to imply that behaviour relating to the Voynich manuscript is unusual whereas it seems to me to be part of a general phenomenon.
It's a combination of it being long, of unknown origin, and filled with ambiguity, with no actual evidence as to what the text or drawings could mean, if anything. The drawings could be meaningless, with no relation to the text, for all we know. The unknown origin part fuels a wide range of wild theories all on its own. The Zodiac ciphers and Egyptian hieroglyphs at least had confirmed origins, nobody is claiming that the news faked the Zodiac ciphers as a hoax for publicity. Being long and ambiguous makes it easy to find a slice of text that fits any hypothesis, with the right amount of ingenuity and lateral thinking.
(18-03-2025, 01:15 PM)Mark Knowles Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Maybe we are talking at cross-purposes.
Yes, I agree.
The point is that the vast majority of the new solutions can be shown to be invalid, based on publicly available information that invalidates it. The would-be solvers did not bother to check this, and therefore they came up with wrong answers.
While the solution that is the topic of this thread has not been shown yet, the elements that have been provided make it uninteresting.
OK, to be correct: uninteresting for me. Don't want to speak for others.
here is a link to my youtube secrets of the cipher
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The video is 26 minutes long, but the content is only 14 minutes long. Why?
Thank you i will correct this soon.
in the next episode of the secrets of the sipher i will be revealing a secret about Jacobus Horcicky and his involvment as one of the main players in this voynich script. subscribe to my youtube for all the latest updated.
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Please make your announcements here and not in several new threads per day.