How to decipher the MS?

[MarcoP]

If you already know the mechanics of the cipher (for example, the Naibbe cipher) and have some hypothesis about the plaintext language, then you can perform some form of statistical analysis (for example, simulated annealing) using the known bigram and trigram statistics of the plaintext language. This is not particularly complicated and setting it up won't take much time, the latest versions of ChatGPT/Claude/DeepSeek/Gemini should be able to create the code and you can run it with some test encoding scheme to ensure it works.

I think this approach is sensible. My impression is that, at the moment, we are not in a position to apply this to the Voynich manuscript, since we have no realistic candidate for the mechanics of the cipher. To have any hope at all, the candidate should explain all the properties of Voynichese.

A second (much lesser) problem is that decipherment could be computationally hard. If the search space is large (and it is, for something like a XV Century diplomatic cipher), simulated annealing can either take ages or be bound to be trapped in local minima. LLMs can help building a quick code, but efficient processing requires heuristics and ad-hoc methods that are more difficult to define and implement. But, while humans search for candidate ciphers, AI can probably evolve its coding capabilities.