[Movie] This Famous Medieval Book May Be a Hoax

[Torsten]

SciShow published a video about the Voynich manuscript: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

The Voynich manuscript is a subject of fascination with its mysterious drawings of plants, people, and stars, as well as its indecipherable text. But rather than hiding ancient secrets, this book might be a medieval fraud, created by an algorithm executed with nothing more than a pen.

script is a subject of fascination with its mysterious drawings of 

[Koen G]

Who are these scientist that recently made a breakthrough?

[RobGea]

That was a pretty good video, they could have given Torsten and Schinner a shout out though.

[Rafal]

This is good and informative video. The observations appear correct - words are predictable and similar words appear close to each other.
But it still doesn't have to mean that the text is gibberish. I would have some possible explanations.

There is also actually chance that some parts are gibberish (for example plants) while other are meaningful.
I believe this is very important thread which suggests that some parts are "better" than other ones:
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[voynichrose]

Has anyone noticed that two token vords most often end up butted up right next too plant leaves and stems?  It would seem like this is forced.  Is there anyway to see if this would be a culprit of a meaningless text?

[dashstofsk]

Who are these scientist that recently made a breakthrough?

The video seems to be quoting the paper "A Possible Generating Algorithm of the Voynich Manuscript" by Torsten Timm and Andreas Schinner, and dated June 13, 2019. The 'long distance' effect is one more oddity of the manuscript that any 'translation' hypothesis of the manuscript will have to explain.

[Koen G]

I once heard a definition of expertise that includes something along the following lines: the ability to communicate about the consensus on a topic. In other words, you can not only present research, but also frame it within its field. You can compare it to the consensus (if there is any) or weigh how successfully it challenges a competing view.

This video is certainly well researched, but it is presented in a formulaic clickbaity way. The fact that it shows one side of an ongoing debate as a recent scientific breakthrough clearly shows the value of expertise as well.

[Pepper]

The comments suggest it was not a successful video. Few of the commenters seem to have more than a passing interest in the MS but even fewer were convinced by the hoax / algorithm argument.

[nablator]

SciShow videos are mass-produced garbage with a "clickbaity" title, the authors don't know (or care) about the subjects of their videos.

[bi3mw]

Hi Torsten,
it is nice that a video with a high click rate refers to your paper. However, it is still very unlikely that an author would go to such lengths for a hoax in the manner described. I think the argument that it could be an alchemical hoax is, to put it mildly, a very poor one. It is not clear to me which alchemist would ever have bought a manuscript whose content he could do nothing with.

In addition, I consider the creation of such a pseudo-manuscript (with the given scope) to be hardly feasible from a practical point of view. It is not in human nature to create meaningless text on this scale. In the course of continuous writing, one would very probably fall into repetitive patterns. The rare but existing error corrections would also have to be explained.