Decoding the Voynich Symbols

[zachary.kaelan]

The Zodiac 340 also was known for solveritis, and there are still at least one or two who declare their solution is correct despite it being clearly inferior in every metric to the solution identified by David Oranchak et al

The Zodiac letters are an interesting case in how the first one was cracked by a couple of random amateurs, just by guessing the word "kill" was in the message, and then the next one took 51 years and a team of international wizards with modern technology. The duality of mysterious cryptograms. People come to the Voynich (and I assume came to Zodiac 340) expecting it to be like Zodiac 408, where you can plug in a word and the whole thing unravels. I'm confident that it'll actually be more like Zodiac 340, and require a computer brute forcing thousands of solutions (assuming it has meaning).

The key is what you mean by the word "obvious".

Really, things are often "obvious" in hindsight. Any "obvious" breakthrough that took a long time to make, wasn't actually that obvious.