[Talk] Upcoming public lecture on the VM

[LisaFaginDavis]

As others said - it was a great lecture.

I expected something more "physical" and traditional: a discussion of calfskins, pigments and handwriting styles and instead we got some heavy maths and advanced algorithms. That was surprising but for me it felt okay. It doesn't have to be true but it seems promising and definitely worthy to follow.

Understanding how these algoritms work would probably require a lot of time and effort and I suppose only a few will undertake that effort. But if you show that they work with data that we understand then people will accept it. I can imagine a test in which you:

- take some book, written in a random language
- shuffle its pages
- ask the algorithm to restore the original page order

The important point is that, as you said it, the algoritm is "language agnostic". It doesn't understand words meaning and the bigger sense, it just "sees" the word patterns.

So if I may advise something - do more tests with different texts and see how it works. The problem with Voynich Manuscript is that we don't understandit. If you suggest a different page order based on your calculations then people will say "maybe" and will shrug shoulders   You cannot say now if it's right or wrong. But if you show that your method works with a lot of different works then it will be another story.

Thank you so much! I didn't have time in my lecture to go into details about the other texts we tested - but we did indeed use several different manuscripts to test the method on other texts. This will be laid out in our article.