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+--- Thread: Solve the Voynich to save the world (/thread-3307.html)
RE: Solve the Voynich to save the world - R. Sale - 02-08-2020
If urgency is presumed, then go with what you've got. It's not like the VMs is newly discovered; much is known about it, much more has been discarded.
Assemble a team: The VMs ninjas already are a sort of casual team. What other team is there?? But better coordination could improve performance. A diverse team is important for the variety of perspective, as long as everyone is serious-minded. One person may see what others do not. If one thing is known, it is that the whispy ideas of 'ivory-tower' investigators do not stand up to general scrutiny.
Rather than being handed some misguided, idiosyncratic pronouncement, in multiple iterations, the VMs solution needs to be built from the ground up by an informed consensus of the team, examined and verified step by step.
If this is an attack on the VMs, what are the targets? Where are the areas that are most promising for further investigation? A consensus identification of the more promising lines of investigation would promote the development of working groups. It sort of happens now, in the forums, but rarely gets out of first gear.
Further investigation of libraries has been suggested. Library discoveries have provided some interesting potential interpretations. But what more will new discoveries provide when little credit is given to those already known? If there are problems involving Melusine, which is a patent, historical fact, what about other lost traditions or examples of a more ambiguous representation?
IMO there are two significant problems: glyph identity and language determination. In combination, they present a very difficult situation.
RE: Solve the Voynich to save the world - Koen G - 02-08-2020
Secretly this thread is not about saving the world, but rather about "what needs to be done to solve this thing"? The unlimited resources and sense of urgency are there to kickstart your creative juices.
I would assign current VM researchers to key positions, but I would make sure to bring in plenty of fresh blood as well. I would certainly not try to reach consensus, herding cats and all that.
RE: Solve the Voynich to save the world - -JKP- - 02-08-2020
One thing I have learned is that big groups (committees) don't usually come up with good answers.
A small hand-picked group seems to work better. Hand-picked on the basis of skill and, to some extent, on the ability to communicate.
This is certainly true in software development. Pick 3 to 6 of the best, make sure they balance each other's skills (one might be fast and good, another might be slower and good at something else, you don't want 5 people who are good at the exactly same thing). As soon as the group swells to 10 or more, the dynamics change and the project seems to move into another sphere where compromise (and politics) tend to increase the time and reduce the quality of the results.
When companies hire programmers they often seem ignorant of the fact that software design is not the same as programming and quality assurance and bug fixing is not the same as programming. Often they hire a team of programmers and completely neglect to hire a software designer (someone who understands psychology, ergonomics, and the research on how individuals react to color, location, shapes, etc). The same is true of debuggers. I know a lot of programmers and I've worked with a number of them who are brilliant, and they are not all good at debugging. It seems to be a specialized skill and I've only met a couple who were good at it. Most of the "bright lights" want to get on with the next great idea, they don't want to sit there looking for and fixing bugs, but there ARE people who enjoy this and are good at it.
In other words, you have to have a sense of what is needed to solve the problem and pick people who come at it from both ends.
How this relates to the VMS is more difficult. We don't know if it's language, we don't know if it's meaningful. If it is meaningful, we don't know what language it is or what steps are needed to process it into language (or whatever symbology might be involved). If it's not meaningful, or only lightly so, we don't know if the imagery or the text is more revealing. So there are many unknowns. How do you pick a team? Not only is it a multidisciplinary study (which is what makes it so interesting to me), we don't know which skills are going to be most effective in solving it.
It's quite possible that a single individual coming out of left field will find a solution.
RE: Solve the Voynich to save the world - R. Sale - 03-08-2020
So we have the 'cats' already. The question is: To herd or not to herd. Not herding is, and always has been, the status quo. Always waiting for the shining solution to come trotting in from left field. And trot they do, but the solutions have all been flawed.
Why not try something different? If productive tasks could be identified, researchers could self-select according to their interests. It seems better to co-operate and build a solution, rather that take proposed solutions and only critique the flaws.
But wait, you're right, that option is already available and it's been going nowhere fast.
RE: Solve the Voynich to save the world - -JKP- - 03-08-2020
Part of the reason I blog (most of the reason I blog) is to share what I have so it doesn't have to be done all over again. It might not all be perfect, I might not always know what it means, but getting it out there hopefully moves us forward rather than in circles.
The problem is that I can't keep up. You can recognize something important in seconds if you have enough background and research to support your perceptions, but it takes hours or days or weeks to try to explain it to an audience that hasn't been researching the same corner of the universe. This takes time away from research. I'm still trying to write up things I found six years ago.
RE: Solve the Voynich to save the world - MarcoP - 03-08-2020
I was thinking of a Yale/Google Study Group. In the real world, what is being done at Yale seems to me like our best hope for actual progress.
People at Google are great at computer science and computational linguistics. In particular, I would like to know You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.'s opinion about the VMS, and see what he can find with some of our unlimited budget. His only paper I read is You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., but he has an interest in several areas that appear to be quite relevant. For instance, his expertise on text normalization could be applied to making sense of the different "dialects". He has also been working on the Easter Island rongorongo script, so he is not indifferent to the appeal of the unreadable. But, from his comment You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., I understand he thinks the VMS is probably a hoax.
Indeed the text could be meaningless or the meaning unrecoverable: the world could be doomed.
Would the President be willing to invest on glossolalia? I don't think that could count as a "solution", but I would be curious to have access to more extensive transcriptions.
RE: Solve the Voynich to save the world - Aga Tentakulus - 03-08-2020
The real problem is not to solve the VM.
The real problem, we already have too many solutions. And every week there are more.
RE: Solve the Voynich to save the world - Koen G - 03-08-2020
(03-08-2020, 10:43 AM)Aga Tentakulus Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The real problem is not to solve the VM.
The real problem, we already have too many solutions. And every week there are more.
Most of those are not solutions, they are hobbies.
RE: Solve the Voynich to save the world - Ruby Novacna - 03-08-2020
(03-08-2020, 10:43 AM)Aga Tentakulus Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.we already have too many solutionsNo two solutions (to my knowledge) use the same alphabet. So we are in the presence of two problems: to know how to evaluate the correctness of assigning the phonetic value of the VM glyphs and how to evaluate the correctness of the choice of language. Programmers who design automatic translators can, in my opinion, solve both problems: comparing the text of the manuscript with medieval texts by changing the value of the glyphs. Of course, the current automatic translator would have to be reconfigured, when I think, for example, of the possible number of variants of the writing of words in Old Slavonic. Already those who make the statistics on the manuscript could with their knowledge check several proposed solutions, but they do not do it. Look for the error!
RE: Solve the Voynich to save the world - bi3mw - 03-08-2020
It is an interesting question whether existing approaches, which seem to be targeted, should be reviewed or whether one should start from scratch. With the first option you have a selection problem, with the second one year is very short.