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+--- Thread: Has anyone ever tried something different than substitution cipher? (/thread-3967.html)
Has anyone ever tried something different than substitution cipher? - Rafal - 16-03-2023
There were many attempts of reading Voynich manuscript.
Probably I don't know all of them but it seems to me most of them was treating Voynich script like a simple, monoalphabetic, substitution cipher.
This sign is "s", this sign is "a", this sign is "g". and so on. And it never changes through all the text.
My question is - has anyone ever tried something more advanced? Syllabic cipher, Alberti cipher, treating "vords" as numbers and so on?
If there were such attempts, what were the results?
RE: Has anyone ever tried something different than substitution cipher? - Mark Knowles - 16-03-2023
I haven't really seen attempts to try to apply any cipher to the Voynich manuscript. I think the problem is that Voynich researchers aren't in the habit of breaking ciphers. I think getting an understanding of the practical problems involved in breaking ciphers of any kind would be useful.
RE: Has anyone ever tried something different than substitution cipher? - R. Sale - 16-03-2023
On VMs You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. there is a band with the 4 by 17 sequence of symbols. Based on the fifth symbol in the sequence, there are three historical interpretations.
Greek: omega, _, _, _, lambda
Medieval numeral: _, 4, _, _, 7
Roman numeral: V, inverted, in the fifth position.
Greek is alphanumeric: letters <=> numbers
Three historical interpretations, supported by objective, positional confirmations, using the same sequence of VMs symbols. How do they interact?
RE: Has anyone ever tried something different than substitution cipher? - nablator - 16-03-2023
Another approach is to produce pseudo-Voynichese - with as much as possible of the statistical features that we all know and love - from a text written in a natural language. Because we need to understand it before we solve it.
There was a thread here with interesting ideas: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
RE: Has anyone ever tried something different than substitution cipher? - MarcoP - 16-03-2023
Decoders who are happy with word salads to seed their creative writing do not need anything more complex than simple substitution.
For more inquisitive researchers, the problem is identifying cipher systems that could result in all the bizarre properties of Voynichese. Bowern and Gaskell (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., 2022) consider several different methods, similarly to the approach mentioned by Nablator. They conclude that "Many manipulations produce outcomes that are similar to Voynich text on at least some metrics... [but] These text manipulations did not produce a single set of changes that mimic Voynich text".
Hauer and Kondrak (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., 2016) attempted an in-depth exploration of anagrammed substitution ciphers. Their approach is straightforward and sensible in my opinion: writing a custom software aimed at decoding the text under specific assumptions about the nature of the cipher. But before committing such a great effort in experimenting with a specific method, one should be reasonably sure that the method can result in something statistically overlapping with Voynichese (which is not the case for an anagrammed simple substitution). At the current state of research, Bowern and Gaskell's approach seems to me the best line of investigation for those interested in Voynichese as a cipher.