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+--- Thread: [Article] Harvard physicist's take on the VMS (/thread-6147.html)
RE: Harvard physicist's take on the VMS - RenegadeHealer - 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?
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."
You have a valid point, Koen. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. And on the subject of absence, it's worth remembering that the vast majority of human writing specimens have been lost irretrievably. Think personal notebooks and letters, which seldom outlast their owner for very long, if at all. And of course, less and less of what was written survives the farther back one goes.
It's possible — likely, even — that the vast expanse of lost writing included many that were clearly meaningful to the writer and intended reader(s), encoded symbolically in a way that nearly any other people would find odd, idiosyncratic, and impenetrable. I reckon without the backstories and creator Q&A, many of the posts on the Subreddits r/neography and r/conscripts would fall into this category.
In terms of what has and has not been done before, Schwartz brings up Luigi Serafini's Codex Seraphinianus. Serafini is a fairly private man, who grants few interviews. He is reluctant to comment much on his bizarre creation, and has been somewhat cryptic and terse when he has. But he has steadfastly denied its text has any meaning: It's meant to be marveled at and wondered about, and give the beholder a creepy sense of liminality and the uncanny valley effect. The parallels are problematic, particularly the fact that the Codex Seraphinianus was written in 1981, and there are some tantalizing hints that Serafini was familiar with not only with the VMs, but also with the modern traditions of asemic writing and Dadaism / Surrealism. Still, Schwartz's point remains: An entire volume of bizarrely illustrated meaningless writing is something that at least one person has been motivated to create successfully. Why couldn't someone half a millennium prior been willing and able to do similarly?
But you're right: we don't have any real basis for telling the difference between meaningful symbolic language encoded in a way that's too idiosyncratic and lacking in context for the meaning to be extracted, and asemic writing that looks meaningful but isn't.
I hope you're right and I'm wrong.
RE: Harvard physicist's take on the VMS - Koen G - 03-10-2026
(03-10-2026, 06:52 PM)nablator Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.(it would be a massive overkill to use such a technique) but Occam's razor makes them dispensable.
If "massive overkill" is a factor to take into consideration, I'm not sure if anything remains on the table ;)
Just to be clear, my preference doesn't lean one way or the other. To be fair, most of the research I do these days is aimed at trying to learn what we can even if the text is never comprehended. But Occam's razor will be dull and bent long before slicing through all possible options.
RE: Harvard physicist's take on the VMS - Rafal - 03-10-2026
[*]
Quote:[*]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?
I feel there is more argumentation in the text.
[*]There is a chapter 5.1 Word order and vocabulary which tries to show that VM has a very weak word structure, different from real text. You cannot make a decent prediction a word based on the previous word, unlike in real languages.
[*]I am unable to evaluate the strength and validity of the argumentation, however.
RE: Harvard physicist's take on the VMS - Jorge_Stolfi - 04-10-2026
(03-10-2026, 04:05 PM)RenegadeHealer Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.... 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.
And that is the big problem with the LLMs: Their "deductions" are not really deductions, but the blending and distillation of the "deductions" that are out there. If enough of their sources make a false claim (like "Elon Musk is a genius"), they will state that claim as a fact.
No, sorry, it s not true that "the VMS has many statistical properties that have not been documented in any extant specimen of meaningful human writing".
For one thing, obviously no one has tested every specimen of meaningful human writing.
But let's be generous and assume that what the lalamo meant was that "the VMS has many statistical properties that are distinct from those of most specimens of meaningful human writing that have been tested by Voynichologists".
That statement is true enough, but hides the fact that practically all such tests have used samples of European or Semitic languages only.
And most of those tests even used the wrong type of text, like novels or phlosophical treatises instead of herbals and materia medicas.
And many tests were character-based statistics, like digraph frequencies and per-character entropy, which are primarily properties of the alphabet and spelling, not of the language.
A "better truth" is that, in fact, the VMS text has many statistical properties that are a surprisingly good match to those of certain natural languages. Just not the European and Semitic ones...
All the best, --stolfi
RE: Harvard physicist's take on the VMS - ololololo - 04-10-2026
(Yesterday, 03:03 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.the VMS text has many statistical properties that are a surprisingly good match to those of certain natural languages.I’ve never seen such statistical comparisons before. Could you show them visually?
Will there be similarities between VMS and other texts besides SBS?
RE: Harvard physicist's take on the VMS - DG97EEB - 04-10-2026
(Yesterday, 03:03 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.(03-10-2026, 04:05 PM)RenegadeHealer Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.... 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.
And that is the big problem with the LLMs: Their "deductions" are not really deductions, but the blending and distillation of the "deductions" that are out there. If enough of their sources make a false claim (like "Elon Musk is a genius"), they will state that claim as a fact.
No, sorry, it s not true that "the VMS has many statistical properties that have not been documented in any extant specimen of meaningful human writing".
For one thing, obviously no one has tested every specimen of meaningful human writing.
But let's be generous and assume that what the lalamo meant was that "the VMS has many statistical properties that are distinct from those of most specimens of meaningful human writing that have been tested by Voynichologists".
That statement is true enough, but hides the fact that practically all such tests have used samples of European or Semitic languages only.
And most of those tests even used the wrong type of text, like novels or phlosophical treatises instead of herbals and materia medicas.
And many tests were character-based statistics, like digraph frequencies and per-character entropy, which are primarily properties of the alphabet and spelling, not of the language.
A "better truth" is that, in fact, the VMS text has many statistical properties that are a surprisingly good match to those of certain natural languages. Just not the European and Semitic ones...
All the best, --stolfi
Would this work?
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
RE: Harvard physicist's take on the VMS - Mauro - 04-10-2026
(03-10-2026, 12:50 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.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."
I agree on this. The prose is confusing and involuted, to me at least.
RE: Harvard physicist's take on the VMS - Bluetoes101 - 04-10-2026
(Yesterday, 05:25 PM)Mauro Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I agree on this. The prose is confusing and involuted, to me at least.
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
My votes for the bucket.
RE: Harvard physicist's take on the VMS - Ruby Novacna - 05-10-2026
(02-10-2026, 08:53 PM)Jacob Carolus Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.... the formatting is spectacular and the referencing is next level.
I’ve re-read the initial post more carefully, along with online comments about Matthew Schwartz, and I think I was looking at his article from the wrong angle.
What should be evaluated isn't so much his achievement regarding the Voynich manuscript itself, but rather his software's ability to generate articles across various fields.
At first glance, there is indeed a significant difference in presentation compared to the AI-generated articles previously shared on this forum. That said, the content still requires in-depth verification by specialists.
Unfortunately, I haven't quite grasped the extent of human involvement or how to use his "Bootloops" tool.
If you’ve figured it out, please enlighten me.
For instance, does Bootloops handle the literature search entirely on its own, or does it require specific instructions?
Gemini on Chrome tends to stop after just 3–5 references. (It's true, I'm terrible at AI)
RE: Harvard physicist's take on the VMS - Rafal - 05-10-2026
Everybody really needs to check the Reddit link above.
It looks like the guy in short time generated with AI 36 articles on different fields that aren't his professional area of expertise.
And he is sponsored by AI company so these articles are more an advertisement of their product than the real science.
In my opinion the world is taking a very wrong turn.
Scientists will be quickly and in mass amount generating huge texts written in complicated AI style way.
Reviewers won't be able to read and evaluate these texts quickly enough so they will be using AI as well for their reviews.
Finally we will be getting a lot of texts that nobody reads and nobody understands
