[Article] "The Strange Quest to Crack the Voynich Code"

[Torsten]

The article at undark.org is constructing an antitheses to Schinners results by arguing: "A team of scientists in Brazil and Germany in 2013 ran their own statistical analyses and drew the opposite conclusion: The text was likely written in a language, and not randomly generated." But this doesn't mean that Schinner and Amancio et al. got different statistical results or that Amancio et al. are arguing against Schinners paper.

Schinner concluded in 2007 that the text "has been created using 'algorithmic' methods, implicitly or explicitly involving some degree of randomness." (Schinner 2007, p. 106). Schinner also wrote: "However, the VMS text obviously is not composed of simple random strings, and it shows rich linguistic-like structure" (Schinner 2007, p. 96). The paper of Amancio on the other side didn't say anything about a text generation method. Their paper only concludes that the text "differs from a random sequence of words" and is "compatible with natural languages" (Amancio et al. 2013). In some way both papers are arguing that the text is not composed of random strings and shows some linguistic-like structure. The only difference is that Schinner interpreted the statistical results as evidence for a stochastic process whereas Amancio et al. interpreted it as evidence for the language hypotheses.

In 2013 also a paper from Montemurro and Zanette was published: "You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.". The paper uses a similar approach and comes to a similar result as the Amancio-paper. The paper of Montemurro and Zanette had more impact and is therefore better known. It was also discussed by linguists like You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. For instance Chrisomalis criticizes: "simply because the VM has some structure, even one that resembles language in some ways, does not entail that it is likely to have a genuine linguistic structure". Chrisomalis concludes: "So in essence, Montemurro and Zanette seem to be suggesting that the VM has properties similar to no writing system ever known to have been used on earth, because they do not seem to know what sorts of writing systems they are comparing things to" (Chrisomalis 2013).

The paper of Montemurro would better fit into the undark.org article. At least it argues against a simple text generation method: "In summary, simple methods to generate random texts with some sort of local statistical structure may seem, under superficial scrutiny, rather convincing solutions to the problem presented by the Voynich manuscript. However, the statistical structure of the text at its various levels still requires an explanation that needs to go beyond reproducing local features like word forms or local word sequences. Here, we have contributed evidence of non-trivial statistical structure in the long-range use of words in the Voynich text." (Montemurro & Zanette 2013).

The reason that the undark.org article is referencing the Amancio-paper might be an article on VICE.com from 2014: "You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.". The article is about the Amancio-paper from 2013 and like the article at undark.org the article from 2014 is also very enthusiastic about statistical tests and the use of computers.