Voynich an AI

[DonaldFisk]

Could be we are not that far away.
Machine learning Transcriber:
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AlphaZero, which within 24 hours achieved a superhuman level of play in Chess, Shogi and Go defeating Stockfish, elmo and AlphaGo Zero.
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The first link is about transcription.   Yes, a similar technique could be used to transcribe the Voynich Manuscript.   Why the resulting transcription would be more accurate than existing transcriptions is unclear.

The second link is a proposal to use AI to translate texts in a language (Sumerian) which people can already read, to deal with a backlog of untranslated material.  The artificial neural network (ANN) based approach to translation requires a bilingual corpus of texts, which exists for Sumerian and English.   Even if this project were successful, for the same approach to work on the Voynich Manuscript would require it to be written in a natural language, which seems unlikely, and for there to be a corpus of Voynichese and English texts, which of course there isn't.

The third link deals with playing games, with the ANN being used for static evaluation of board positions.   AlphaZero is impressive at what it does, but it's nowhere near to being a general AI, therefore it can't translate unreadable text.

Every incarnation of AI has, unfortunately, been accompanied by a deluge of hype containing claims that AI systems will exceed human intelligence real soon now.  ANNs, like the search and knowledge-based approaches which preceded them, are no exception.   I'll believe results when I see them, not when they're predicted.