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Who is even still working on a solution for the VMS?
- Who is even still working on a solution for the VMS?
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RE: Who is even still working on a solution for the VMS?
anyasophira > 27-05-2026, 05:53 AM
The entry on the voynich days have a lot of the most recent information and research. The past two years were great as they had a lot of research about the way the text behaves( loops , line as a function etc) Lisa Fagin Davis scribe work and the naibbe cipher. YouTube has the videos.
I particularly love the research Tavie does on the text features and Patrick Feaster’s loops, but there are many incredible researchers.
The 2022 Voynich conference is also great.
Also René is the glue that holds a lot of this together- his site will have latest info. But the work is slow and hard won.
Enjoy the rabbit holes
Annah/Anya -
RE: Who is even still working on a solution for the VMS?
petronio > 28-05-2026, 04:35 PM
I'm new here. I'm an independent researcher and my focus is on text statistics — specifically whether the structure of Voynichese tokens fits known morphological patterns when systematically compared across corpora from different language families. The goal is typological, not a specific decipherment: trying to characterise what kind of writing system the statistics point to, before asking which one. Stolfi's work on the structural properties of the text is what initially attracted me. I found the forum very interesting and I'm sure I still have a lot to learn here. -
RE: Who is even still working on a solution for the VMS?
DG97EEB > 28-05-2026, 05:29 PM
(28-05-2026, 04:35 PM)petronio Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I'm new here. I'm an independent researcher and my focus is on text statistics — specifically whether the structure of Voynichese tokens fits known morphological patterns when systematically compared across corpora from different language families. The goal is typological, not a specific decipherment: trying to characterise what kind of writing system the statistics point to, before asking which one. Stolfi's work on the structural properties of the text is what initially attracted me. I found the forum very interesting and I'm sure I still have a lot to learn here.
I've created a Voynich search engine. Use it to see what has been discussed before.. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. -
RE: Who is even still working on a solution for the VMS?
petronio > 29-05-2026, 10:08 PM
Thank you — that's exactly the kind of resource I needed. Very useful to have a searchable archive, especially on the statistical side. I'll be spending some time going through it! -
RE: Who is even still working on a solution for the VMS?
Mauro > 08-06-2026, 06:27 PM
(26-05-2026, 12:30 PM)quimqu Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I’m not working on any Voynich solution. Since the beginning of my study, mostly driven by curiosity, I’ve been trying to analyse the peculiarities of the text, look for patterns, and things like that, but today it’s impossible for me to propose any solution that really fits with what I found. Most of the things I found were already known before, I just arrived to them through diferent methods and experiments.
Right now I honestly can’t even say if I believe the text has meaning or not, or if it is a cipher or not. And I think it’s a waste of time to confront any theorical solution before we really understand the limits and characteristics of the text itself.
For me, the correct direction is this one: understand the text as much as possible first, and then maybe one day, with some inspiration (well, it may take more than one day), think about a possible solution that could explain everything.
I agree with quimqu, and I've seen progress made in this direction on this forum lately. There have also been other interesting developments (ie. the thread on month names in the marginalia and the thread on castles with swallowtail merlons).
If I had time at the moment to write some more code I'd explore the idea of a many-to-many (and thus probably undecipherable) substitution cipher, which is as good as many other ideas, and probably also as bad. -
RE: Who is even still working on a solution for the VMS?
Malatin_1 > 13-06-2026, 07:47 PM
I've been working on it since February 2025. The first night I worked on it, I discovered something remarkable. I haven't been able to let it go since. I hope to publish my findings later this year. -
RE: Who is even still working on a solution for the VMS?
DG97EEB > 14-06-2026, 09:29 PM
(13-06-2026, 07:47 PM)Malatin_1 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I've been working on it since February 2025. The first night I worked on it, I discovered something remarkable. I haven't been able to let it go since. I hope to publish my findings later this year.
Me too.. I discovered that after 9 months of testing every single theory I this board and everyone else could think of, not a single one stood up to proper scientific scrutiny, and I'm none the wiser as a result...I could publish a paper on all the things I know it's now not, but that's not much interest... -
RE: Who is even still working on a solution for the VMS?
JoeyB > 16-06-2026, 04:02 PM
(28-05-2026, 04:35 PM)petronio Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I'm new here. I'm an independent researcher and my focus is on text statistics — specifically whether the structure of Voynichese tokens fits known morphological patterns when systematically compared across corpora from different language families. The goal is typological, not a specific decipherment: trying to characterise what kind of writing system the statistics point to, before asking which one. Stolfi's work on the structural properties of the text is what initially attracted me. I found the forum very interesting and I'm sure I still have a lot to learn here.
You may find this paper and the downloadable corpus by Lindemann and Bowern useful for this:
The paper: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
The corpus and the code: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
It's nice to have all of that work put together by the pros. Good luck! -
RE: Who is even still working on a solution for the VMS?
JustAnotherTheory > 16-06-2026, 06:26 PM
I am working on a solution. And it's quite promising, actually. Here is the MD5 of the main proposition, since such things seem to be the common practice around here:
ec1581a8934c179303b8bd94c58ccc9d
The theory is that the VMS text is meaningless. I have a system that can generate Voynichese (but without meaning), and accounts for the various characteristics of the text:
- Repeating words,
- Consecutive words that only differ by one or two "tokens",
- A system of common prefixes and suffixes,
- Positive autocorrelation of word lengths (words that are in short-short-long-long order rather than long-short-long-short as one would expect in a natural language),
- "Topic-words", i.e., larger structural features of the text, in which page-specific "topics" seem to emerge (which Gaskell & Bowern mentioned in their paper as being a major limitation of today's theories that the VMS text is meaningless).
Furthermore, the method I found is consistent with what was available with early 15th century techniques, so does not require a Cardan-Grille like Rugg & Taylor suggested (which came much later), or fancy disks and Fontana-like mnemonic tecnhiques.
This, of course, would not prove that the VMS is gibberish. Nor would it exclude that some Voynichese words are meaningful but steganographically hidden in meaningless text. This method would simply show a way to generate meaningless Voynichese without much trouble.
Of course, I don't make any assumptions on why one would generate 200 pages of meaningless text.
Anyway, once I'll write it up, in a way that is clear for readers, I will post it here
- Repeating words,
-
RE: Who is even still working on a solution for the VMS?
quimqu > 16-06-2026, 10:15 PM
(16-06-2026, 06:26 PM)JustAnotherTheory Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I am working on a solution. And it's quite promising, actually. Here is the MD5 of the main proposition, since such things seem to be the common practice around here:
ec1581a8934c179303b8bd94c58ccc9d
The theory is that the VMS text is meaningless. I have a system that can generate Voynichese (but without meaning), and accounts for the various characteristics of the text:
- Repeating words,
- Consecutive words that only differ by one or two "tokens",
- A system of common prefixes and suffixes,
- Positive autocorrelation of word lengths (words that are in short-short-long-long order rather than long-short-long-short as one would expect in a natural language),
- "Topic-words", i.e., larger structural features of the text, in which page-specific "topics" seem to emerge (which Gaskell & Bowern mentioned in their paper as being a major limitation of today's theories that the VMS text is meaningless).
Furthermore, the method I found is consistent with what was available with early 15th century techniques, so does not require a Cardan-Grille like Rugg & Taylor suggested (which came much later), or fancy disks and Fontana-like mnemonic tecnhiques.
This, of course, would not prove that the VMS is gibberish. Nor would it exclude that some Voynichese words are meaningful but steganographically hidden in meaningless text. This method would simply show a way to generate meaningless Voynichese without much trouble.
Of course, I don't make any assumptions on why one would generate 200 pages of meaningless text.
Anyway, once I'll write it up, in a way that is clear for readers, I will post it here
Hello,
I have worked on a very simple substitution model that generates Voynich-like text. It matches the entropy values, follows a very similar Zipf distribution, and is surprisingly easy to implement.
The basic idea is to find a natural text with a similar Zipf curve and then assume that Voynich words were generated beforehand through small modifications (changing a character, adding one, deleting one, etc., roughly Levenshtein distance = 1). In my case, I found that "De docta ignorantia" has the best fit in terms of Zipf. After that, I simply replace the most frequent natural-language word with the most frequent Voynich word, the second most frequent with the second most frequent, and so on.
The real problem is not generating Voynich-like words. The real problem is reproducing the text structure: the use of gallows at the beginning of paragraphs, the distribution of word endings at the ends of lines, the preferred prefixes at the beginnings of lines, and similar positional effects.
In other words, generating Voynich-like words and replacing one word with another can reproduce many of the global statistical properties almost automatically. But reproducing the structural patterns of the manuscript is much harder.
Does your method generate these structural features as well? - Repeating words,