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+--- Thread: [Article] Harvard physicist's take on the VMS (/thread-6147.html)
RE: Harvard physicist's take on the VMS - kckluge - 02-10-2026
Apropos of nothing in particular, I found the following interesting: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
RE: Harvard physicist's take on the VMS - Koen G - 03-10-2026
I'm gonna be honest with y'all: I can't read this. Too technical or too AI?
"Funding for this project was provided by Anthropic. This is not an official Anthropic project and results and views are not endorsed by Anthropic."
RE: Harvard physicist's take on the VMS - nablator - 03-10-2026
(03-10-2026, 12:50 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Too technical or too AI?
Both. Too dense and sometimes unclear: AI prose is horrible. But the methods and conclusions are interesting nevertheless, supposing that the claims can be trusted and are not hallucinations.
RE: Harvard physicist's take on the VMS - RenegadeHealer - 03-10-2026
This paper was a bit over my head, and I'm a little relieved to find that I'm not the only one who felt that way. I'm STEM trained and have read a lot of scientific papers, but I'm not a coder, and information science is not my area of expertise. Nevertheless, when glyph and token statistics and Shannon entropy were a big topic of discussion around the beginning of this decade here, I was able to grok the basic concepts and keep up with the discussions with some mental effort. My efforts to do the same with Schwartz & Anthropic 2026 humbled me. I had a very hard time grasping a clear layman's level understanding of what exactly each of the statistical tests was measuring, and, especially, why the test and control specimens were selected and parsed the way they were.
That said, my non-expert impression is that over time, support for the VMs text containing any sort of linguistic message is becoming less and less robust, and the hypothesis that a meaningful message exists less and less tenable.
I'm sure there is much room for improvement in Prof Schwartz's methodology. I'm sure there are real limitations and even methodological flaws, that I'm not qualified to notice or critique. That's just how science works. But my inchoate sense is that this study's sources of methodological error will turn out to be trivial, and not really damning to Schwartz's main point: The VMs text has too many statistical properties that have not been documented in any extant specimen of human writing known to be meaningful, even on their own, let alone together. Schwartz does a decent job enumerating these properties and explaining them in plain English. The end result is a compelling sense of just how steep a hike up Mount Improbable the apologetics for any sort of meaningful VMs is. Wladimir Dulov is about 90% convinced of Timm & Schinner's self-citation hypothesis, per his latest blog post. I'm sad to say, I'm getting close to that.
I hold out some hope that the VMs text could be meaningful information, but not of the type that is linguistically expressed. Think raw observation data on natural phenomena, musical notation, account ledgers, etc.
RE: Harvard physicist's take on the VMS - DG97EEB - 03-10-2026
(03-10-2026, 04:05 PM)RenegadeHealer Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.This paper was a bit over my head, and I'm a little relieved to find that I'm not the only one who felt that way. I'm STEM trained and have read a lot of scientific papers, but I'm not a coder, and information science is not my area of expertise. Nevertheless, when glyph and token statistics and Shannon entropy were a big topic of discussion around the beginning of this decade here, I was able to grok the basic concepts and keep up with the discussions with some mental effort. My efforts to do the same with Schwartz & Anthropic 2026 humbled me. I had a very hard time grasping a clear layman's level understanding of what exactly each of the statistical tests was measuring, and, especially, why the test and control specimens were selected and parsed the way they were.
That said, my non-expert impression is that over time, support for the VMs text containing any sort of linguistic message is becoming less and less robust, and the hypothesis that a meaningful message exists less and less tenable.
I'm sure there is much room for improvement in Prof Schwartz's methodology. I'm sure there are real limitations and even methodological flaws, that I'm not qualified to notice or critique. That's just how science works. But my inchoate sense is that this study's sources of methodological error will turn out to be trivial, and not really damning to Schwartz's main point: The VMs text has too many statistical properties that have not been documented in any extant specimen of human writing known to be meaningful, even on their own, let alone together. Schwartz does a decent job enumerating these properties and explaining them in plain English. The end result is a compelling sense of just how steep a hike up Mount Improbable the apologetics for any sort of meaningful VMs is. Wladimir Dulov is about 90% convinced of Timm & Schinner's self-citation hypothesis, per his latest blog post. I'm sad to say, I'm getting close to that.
I hold out some hope that the VMs text could be meaningful information, but not of the type that is linguistically expressed. Think raw observation data on natural phenomena, musical notation, account ledgers, etc.
Well said..
RE: Harvard physicist's take on the VMS - Koen G - 03-10-2026
(03-10-2026, 04:05 PM)RenegadeHealer Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The VMs text has too many statistical properties that have not been documented in any extant specimen of human writing known to be meaningful, even on their own, let alone together. Schwartz does a decent job enumerating these properties and explaining them in plain English. The end result is a compelling sense of just how steep a hike up Mount Improbable the apologetics for any sort of meaningful VMs is.
I agree that what we see in the manuscript is unique, and there is no immediately obvious way to see how it can be turned into something that's meaningful. But there is one leap in the logic I just cannot comprehend.
- Voynichese does not look like a straightforward representation of natural language --> agreed
- Moreover, it cannot be readily understood as the result of common medieval cipher methods --> agreed
- We don't know of anything like this --> agreed
- ERGO, Voynichese must be the result of a nonsense-generating algorithm performed by the medieval scribe(s) --> what?
Why? Is that "more attested"? Less unusual?
I'm probably misrepresenting some arguments here, but to me it sounds like "if this text contains meaning, it must have been done in a way that's never been done before, therefore they must have done this whole other thing that has never been done before."
Regarding the article, the least one can say is that it's not kind to the reader. It would be great to get a version of this that's written in human language.
RE: Harvard physicist's take on the VMS - DG97EEB - 03-10-2026
I don't think it's an a priori conclusion, Koen. I've personally tested every class of cipher, not just those available in the 15th century, and nothing comes close. Even Naibbe is really only replicating a small part of the stats. I've also created over 100 different generators, as well as what I now regard as a nearly exhaustive statistical map of the text itself. I must have tried 50 languages and used actual glyphs and all flavours of EVA, and the consistent result is that it's possible to simulate surface stats, like entropy, but deeper stats, like the one Grescko admitted he couldn't reach, are nigh on impossible..
Every time I try to push it further, I end up with a result that looks like it's generated but there's always some very small residual element that cannot be accounted for, which hints that maybe there's something more, but I've found no mechanism to tease it out yet. Hence why I say I'm 95% sure it's generated, but maybe there's some dual level encoding where underlying text is being enciphered and then replayed... But at that point you're really in to special pleading..
But I also agree that the book it far too intricate and planned and deliberate to be anything other than used, and to be used and useful, there must be some way to decode it..
I guess that's the Voynich paradox everyone has been stuck with for a century now...
RE: Harvard physicist's take on the VMS - rikforto - 03-10-2026
(03-10-2026, 06:05 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I'm probably misrepresenting some arguments here, but to me it sounds like "if this text contains meaning, it must have been done in a way that's never been done before, therefore they must have done this whole other thing that has never been done before."I think you come by this honestly, even if its not the fairest representation of the good versions of the arguments.
It's not exactly a strawman when someone who agrees with you restates your argument in a much weaker way, but this happens to Timm and Schinner a lot. They make pretty modest, bounded claims about their model and what it shows, but their imitators are quick to present extensions more the way you are describing. I'm not sure anyone has ever gotten quite as crass as your list of bullet points, but it is "in the air" around Time-and-Schinner-style models a lot.
It's also part of a bigger style of argumentation people around here are very fond of: "All these other theories don't work, so my theory surely must be accepted!" The linguistic theories haven't won out, so that means the non-linguistic theories surely must be correct! No buddy, the graveyard of Voynich theories has infinite capacity!
RE: Harvard physicist's take on the VMS - nablator - 03-10-2026
(03-10-2026, 06:05 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Why? Is that "more attested"? Less unusual?
More plausible.
Many statistical features are unlike any 15th century ciphertext (simple substitution with some homophones and nulls): drifts, rigid word structure, extreme variations, does not behave like flowing text. Ciphers typically used well identifiable symbols, whereas the VMS favors ambiguity. All of them are compatible with a clumsy attempt to create pseudo-text with low-tech copy/paste methods and (evolving) constraints/rules/preferences, because the scribes just didn't care to enforce consistent rules/procedures.
Sure there are more than two possibilities, there could be some other type of meaning (music? divination? game record?) or even a plaintext hidden in a steganographic manner (it would be a massive overkill to use such a technique) but Occam's razor makes them dispensable.
RE: Harvard physicist's take on the VMS - bi3mw - 03-10-2026
(03-10-2026, 06:14 PM)DG97EEB Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.But I also agree that the book it far too intricate and planned and deliberate to be anything other than used, and to be used and useful, there must be some way to decode it..
For me, that is THE key point.