17-11-2024, 04:07 PM
Hi!
I was listening to another video about the manuscript today and in the QnA section, someone asked: "What motivations would there be for creating it as a hoax with random gibberish?"
I wasn't too impressed with the answer, and instead it got me thinking the complete opposite way: If you are writing a book on [botany/women's health/astronomy/etc] and you want to encode it, why create such an incredibly difficult to crack cipher?
As I was thinking about this, I was reminded of the Zodiac ciphers from the 1970s. I'm sure most cipher nerds know that the Z-340 was cracked about four years ago now. It was cracked through a computer brute forcing every imaginable way to encode a text, and eventually, after the computer had cracked it, the investigators realized that not only had Zodiac used a highly sophisticated way of scrambling letters; he had made mistakes! So it was only possible to crack a very difficult cipher with mistakes through brute force computer. How is it that that the Voynich Manuscript has survived even longer, and more importantly, why the need to create this level of difficult cipher?
If all you are doing is hiding information about botany, why do you need to go to such lengths as the scribes did? Iirc both Alan Turing and the guy who cracked the Japanese code in WW2 worked on the manuscript (and failed), so, if you're a 14th century botanist who wants to hid information about your plants, why do you need a cipher that is more difficult to crack than the Germans and Japanese used in a world war?
There is a really good video about the Z-340 cipher here on YouTube (link below). Looking at that, the sheer power of computer brute force solving, I am feeling less and less that there is any meaning to the text. And I ask: "why the need to create such a complex cipher?"
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I was listening to another video about the manuscript today and in the QnA section, someone asked: "What motivations would there be for creating it as a hoax with random gibberish?"
I wasn't too impressed with the answer, and instead it got me thinking the complete opposite way: If you are writing a book on [botany/women's health/astronomy/etc] and you want to encode it, why create such an incredibly difficult to crack cipher?
As I was thinking about this, I was reminded of the Zodiac ciphers from the 1970s. I'm sure most cipher nerds know that the Z-340 was cracked about four years ago now. It was cracked through a computer brute forcing every imaginable way to encode a text, and eventually, after the computer had cracked it, the investigators realized that not only had Zodiac used a highly sophisticated way of scrambling letters; he had made mistakes! So it was only possible to crack a very difficult cipher with mistakes through brute force computer. How is it that that the Voynich Manuscript has survived even longer, and more importantly, why the need to create this level of difficult cipher?
If all you are doing is hiding information about botany, why do you need to go to such lengths as the scribes did? Iirc both Alan Turing and the guy who cracked the Japanese code in WW2 worked on the manuscript (and failed), so, if you're a 14th century botanist who wants to hid information about your plants, why do you need a cipher that is more difficult to crack than the Germans and Japanese used in a world war?
There is a really good video about the Z-340 cipher here on YouTube (link below). Looking at that, the sheer power of computer brute force solving, I am feeling less and less that there is any meaning to the text. And I ask: "why the need to create such a complex cipher?"
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.