The Voynich Ninja

PS. I forgot two important bits of advice:

1. Doing statistics at random is unlikely to yield significant insight.  Instead, try to follow the scientific method: make a theory about the language or nature of the text, then look for the simplest test that could refute it.
   
2. "Hapiness to an engineer is a straight line on a log-log plot."
   

All the best,--stolfi

(12-03-2026, 04:49 PM)quimqu Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.What I have been finding lately in the studies I have carried out and posted here is that the results at the level of text structure, entropy, etc., all end up reaching and reaffirming conclusions that “human” experts had already arrived at years or even decades ago. It does not seem that we can squeeze much more information out of the Voynich text, assuming it is a text at all.

I believe that we are still observing and learning new things about the text. Those observations lead to further exploration, and potentially extra information somewhere. Thus far, the conclusions all fundamentally point to "we don't understand the text". 

This is somewhat tangential, but a while ago I was involved in something called "crack the clue", which was an in-game riddle/clue solving event in the game "old school runescape". The developer in charge of the event set up a "treasure hunt" with many steps, with each step containing an almost impossible riddle or clue or lead, with multiple clues relying on eachother too. We're talking about ciphers, steganography, the works. Solving these clues was worked on by a community very similar to this one, with different professions, ideas (also crackpot ideas and conspiracy ideas like here) all desperately hoping to solve a step.

At a certain point, the whole community was stuck. Noone could solve anything for months. Some people resigned themselves to failure, others to a belief that it was a prank, or that there was nothing else to solve. Some people found slight hints of progress, only for it to be a red herring or meaningless. Some kept tirelessly working on a solution. The overall mood was almost identical to how it is here now, with posts almost identical to this post being common.

Eventually, the community had taken so long that the developer decided to give a very vague hint for what was needed (a location in the game, nothing more). Within a day, somebody worked out that there was a hidden morse code message in the midi sound file for that in-game location, which had to be connected with multiple other clues to produce a message. If someone had suggested it as a solution, it would have been called a crackpot theory. 

The community collecively realised that the solution somewhat made sense with the information we had, and could've been solved, technically. Many people had already gone to the location for leads but never for long enough to think of such a solution. The community may have never solved it, but a very vague lead very quickly led to a solution for a seemingly impossible problem.

The same could well happen in the VMS community. Who knows what we will find in the coming time? The rosetta stone manuscript of voynichese may be digitised and uploaded tommorow, for all we know (or some obscure info or marginalia was already digitised, but we haven't found it). Perhaps a different name, or mark, or something else vague will lead us to new evidence that explains a critical aspect of the VMS and its text.

An example of this would have been the carbon dating and MSI scans of the VMS. As far as I can tell, the entire framework of VMS solution hunting (including text analysis) changed significantly after both.

I am aware of more dead ends and closed doors than further avenues of research, but the number of the latter is still greater than zero.

At the same time I would never try to stop anyone from giving up. There are so many other interesting things one can do.

(13-03-2026, 10:47 AM)eggyk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The community collecively realised that the solution somewhat made sense with the information we had, and could've been solved, technically. Many people had already gone to the location for leads but never for long enough to think of such a solution. The community may have never solved it, but a very vague lead very quickly led to a solution for a seemingly impossible problem.

I think there is still huge difference between a riddle designed to be solved, even a very hard one, and an artifact which, most likely, was not intended to be read by outsiders (be it a ciphertext, a hoax, an unknown language). A riddle should be solvable in principle by logic and by trial and error. Voynich Manuscript may be unsolvable without some additional information, which could by now be already lost.

So "would remain unsolved forever" is a very real possibility.

But I don't feel like VMS research is stuck, I'd say it is progressing as swiftly as ever. There are plenty of things to try.

(12-03-2026, 06:34 PM)Fontanellean Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.more Voynichese manuscripts out there somewhere

I think unlikely. However it might still be possible to discover a manuscript written by the author in some other and genuine language by searching for features of his handwriting. For example the letter  e in VMS is usually written not as a full half circle but angled and drooping.

[attachment=14599]

And you see it so also for the character 'c' in the 'michiton' text. Characters  a and  d seem also to be similar. This must be the natural writing style of the author. If some manuscript were to be discovered with a similar style of writing it might gives us some clues to the author and place of the VMS. I think it is unlikely that the author did not write other manuscripts, and these might still be around somewhere.

If someone is truly convinced that there is no progress left to be made, wouldn't they give up?

Unless of course, the true progress is the friends we made along the way 

(13-03-2026, 12:06 PM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I think there is still huge difference between a riddle designed to be solved, even a very hard one, and an artifact which, most likely, was not intended to be read by outsiders (be it a ciphertext, a hoax, an unknown language). A riddle should be solvable in principle by logic and by trial and error. Voynich Manuscript may be unsolvable without some additional information, which could by now be already lost.

So "would remain unsolved forever" is a very real possibility.

But I don't feel like VMS research is stuck, I'd say it is progressing as swiftly as ever. There are plenty of things to try.

Yes, of course. It's more just pointing out the noticeable similarities in the solving process in both and the spread of opinions that arise in the respective communities.

In my example, it was very possible that noone would ever have solved it without additional information. In principle, it was solvable, but only if you knew what to do. Trial and error and logic alone wouldn't have helped, as there was a connection, or a leap of logic, or a guess, or luck, that was needed that everyone had missed. There were a million other different logical paths and a million ways to iterate along those paths, and every one of them would have failed. At the time, most people looked at the solution and said "okay, but how on earth were we meant to know to do that?". The VMS may end up being the same.

I can see a kind of progress in people considering more and more seriously that the text is meaningless.

In the past everyone was convinced that the manuscript is a meaningful, "normal" medieval treatise. Just written in a strange way.

I have read recently about Ethel Voynich tediously going to libraries, browsing a lot of books and trying to identify the plants. Not for a single moment she had a thought that the plants are not existing, that they are frankensteins and chimeras, built from parts of several other plants.
Or remember that sunflower thing.

Today the opinion that plants are imaginary is mainstream, I believe. Acceptance of it IS a progress.

There are people who would disagree but there is more and more acceptance for opinion that the artist was a kind of medieval dj, borrowing and mixing a lot of stuff but not truly understanding it. And there are data being collected that confirm that.
It is also a progress. Maybe not obvious for everyone but for me it is a progress.

(12-03-2026, 04:49 PM)quimqu Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Do you think that, from the perspective of text analysis, it is still possible to go further?

I would approach this question from two perspectives.

First, it is certainly worth questioning whether we can still gain new insights using standard analyses (text structure, entropy, etc.). Here, I see the real task as putting the existing (scant) findings into context and determining what can actually be considered established textual properties and what cannot. Given the multitude of different approaches, which essentially boil down to a few reliable statements, this is no easy undertaking.

On the other hand, it is still possible that a new, groundbreaking hypothesis will be put forward, opening up a completely new approach to text analysis. In my opinion, this is not a question of the available means (including AI) for analysis, but rather depends on how the existing tools are used. Everything hinges on the initial research question.