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+--- Thread: [Article] Harvard physicist's take on the VMS (/thread-6147.html)
Harvard physicist's take on the VMS - magnesium - 02-10-2026
Yesterday, Harvard physicist Matthew Schwartz unveiled a very powerful LLM harness for quantitative science called You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., as well as a whopping 36 papers he has authored or coauthored using the tool. Among them is Schwartz's take on how the VMS was written, which is that it's iteratively generated gibberish:
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His abstract:
The Voynich manuscript is an illustrated book of the early fifteenth century in a script no one has been able to read. Since Rugg, and then Timm and Schinner, showed that text with many of its statistics can be produced mechanically, quantitative study has come to favor a writing procedure over a cipher or an unknown language. Here we make that picture precise with quantitative tools: information theory, efficient methods for mixture-model computation using exact arithmetic, and solvers validated on planted test cases. Readings and text generators become probability models, fitted on half a scribe’s pages and judged on the rest. In six candidate languages, readings by simple or verbose substitution, consonantal writing, abbreviation, codebooks and the Naibbe cipher all fail on withheld pages. Such failures exclude a reading only where the test detects disguised real text of the same kind, so far only for scripture. Knowing a word barely helps predict the next, less than in any comparison text, glossaries included, yet the edge glyphs of adjacent words are coupled as strongly as in a recipe collection. The scribes reused their words, occasionally copied a recent one, and coined others by letter habit; this keyless procedure reproduces nearly all summary statistics of both principal hands. No proposed generator, ours included, reproduces that coupling. Two weak traces of content remain: distinctive label words and a faint dependence of word choice on subject. The low cost of the writing and the genres the pictures imitate suggest a book made to be looked at, not read.
RE: Harvard physicist's take on the VMS - JoJo_Jost - 02-10-2026
Boring - Well, this problem has been known for quite some time now; I have absolutely no idea why it’s still being examined. As long as you’re checking the VMS at the token level, it can’t be a language. Everyone should know that—either the spaces aren’t spaces, or it isn’t a language. My conclusion: The spaces are not spaces.
The starting and ending glyphs are closely related. Yes, exactly, and that’s the reason, why the spaces shouldn't seen as spaces, too. And as soon as you realize that, all these investigations vanish into thin air.
RE: Harvard physicist's take on the VMS - rikforto - 02-10-2026
(02-10-2026, 01:04 PM)magnesium Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.physicistEconomists marked "safe" from this example of unwarranted interdisciplinary overconfidence
RE: Harvard physicist's take on the VMS - Koen G - 02-10-2026
(02-10-2026, 01:28 PM)rikforto Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.unwarranted interdisciplinary overconfidence
RE: Harvard physicist's take on the VMS - pjburkshire - 02-10-2026
(02-10-2026, 01:04 PM)magnesium Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
The low cost of the writing and the genres the pictures imitate suggest a book made to be looked at, not read.
Why bother with all the labels?
Oh, what pretty labels!
RE: Harvard physicist's take on the VMS - nablator - 02-10-2026
Quote:we find no dependence between words beyond the coupling of adjacent word edges
The absence of coupling between words at any distance other than 1 (weak at 1) even if spaces are not spaces and words are not words, should be a problem for any natural language theorist (unless the cipher is heavily homophonic or otherwise allows many different ciphertexts of the same plaintext) but they happily ignore it. IIRC, it was first noticed by Mark Fincher in hisYou are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. article.
RE: Harvard physicist's take on the VMS - DG97EEB - 02-10-2026
If you create a generator from actual Voynich, unsurprisingly it works...what's also not a surprise is it generated some surface statistics but fails at the deeper level, like every other generator....
RE: Harvard physicist's take on the VMS - Ruby Novacna - 02-10-2026
Is this that very long article—with a not-so-long title—containing several tests and graphs, which has been awaited for a few days?
I’m waiting for someone to volunteer to read the 39 pages and share their comments.
RE: Harvard physicist's take on the VMS - Mauro - 02-10-2026
Very interesting, it'll take some time to digest. And a veritable mine of facts and references.
RE: Harvard physicist's take on the VMS - Jacob Carolus - 02-10-2026
(02-10-2026, 03:05 PM)Ruby Novacna Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Is this that very long articlei looked. its long and i haven't seen as many Studies as some informed people. But the formatting is spectacular and the referencing is next level.