I think the most useful aspect of this research is as a "filter" for searching, sorting, selecting, and identifying text in natural languages.
Just as one possible example, imagine a Google Books project in which a large number of books in different languages are scanned. OCR software is used to create PDF transliterations. The OCR software is "tuned" to recognize certain fonts and certain quirks that are specific to each language in order to get the best possible result.
Currently a human tells the software the font (e.g., German black-letter), the language, etc. If the technology developed by these researchers were incorporated into OCR software, then language recognition might become part of the basic OCR package in a more complete and practical way than present versions, and then certain aspects of creating the transliteration could be fine-tuned by software rather than by human intervention.
The software they have developed is not really specific to cryptology and doesn't really come at unknown texts in the most efficient ways (and there are many ways, depending on the structure of the text and how it was encrypted) and I doubt that that was their original impetus or primary goal. It's tantalizing, from a research point of view, to try it out on the Voynich to see what might happen, I don't blame them for trying it, but we can see from the results and also from the various critiques of their results that cryptology-aware researchers perceive the shortcomings of software developed for another purpose when applied to this more specialized problem.
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I wouldn't be surprised, however, if this now becomes a race. Programmers are gamers (at least a high proportion of them are), and gamers are competitive. The media created a frenzy over this and there may be many new software developers who jump in the game to try their hand, especially considering the code was released and can now be readily modified.
Just as one possible example, imagine a Google Books project in which a large number of books in different languages are scanned. OCR software is used to create PDF transliterations. The OCR software is "tuned" to recognize certain fonts and certain quirks that are specific to each language in order to get the best possible result.
Currently a human tells the software the font (e.g., German black-letter), the language, etc. If the technology developed by these researchers were incorporated into OCR software, then language recognition might become part of the basic OCR package in a more complete and practical way than present versions, and then certain aspects of creating the transliteration could be fine-tuned by software rather than by human intervention.
The software they have developed is not really specific to cryptology and doesn't really come at unknown texts in the most efficient ways (and there are many ways, depending on the structure of the text and how it was encrypted) and I doubt that that was their original impetus or primary goal. It's tantalizing, from a research point of view, to try it out on the Voynich to see what might happen, I don't blame them for trying it, but we can see from the results and also from the various critiques of their results that cryptology-aware researchers perceive the shortcomings of software developed for another purpose when applied to this more specialized problem.
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I wouldn't be surprised, however, if this now becomes a race. Programmers are gamers (at least a high proportion of them are), and gamers are competitive. The media created a frenzy over this and there may be many new software developers who jump in the game to try their hand, especially considering the code was released and can now be readily modified.
