Brief introduction of Voynich manuscript
Voynich Manuscript is a mysterious book with unknown content, with 240 pages of illustrations and unknown author. The letters and languages used in the book have not been recognized so far and are completely incompatible with modern languages. It seems to be a reference book for medieval alchemists.
The title Voynich comes from a Polish-American bookseller named wilfred Voynich, who bought this book in Italy in 19 12. In 2005, this book was collected in the Benec Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University, numbered MS408.
The true content of Voynich's manuscript
192 1 year, the first person who claimed to have cracked the Voynich manuscript appeared. Newbold, a professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, pointed out that the letters of Voynich characters contain small strokes that can only be seen after enlargement. These strokes are shorthand characters of ancient Greece.
According to the contents of the password reading, Newbold concluded that the Voynich manuscript was written by Rogge Bakken, a philosophical scientist in the13rd century, in order to describe his discoveries, such as the invention of the microscope. But in less than 10 years, critics overturned Newbold's statement and proved that the so-called tiny strokes in letters are actually natural cracks in ink.
Newbird's efforts are just the beginning of a series of failures. /kloc-in the 1940s, amateur decoders Philly and Shi Zhuang translated Voynich letters into Roman letters by password replacement, but the words thus translated were meaningless.
At the end of World War II, American cryptographers who cracked the Japanese navy used their leisure time to study ancient ciphertext. They cracked all the ciphertext, except the Voynich manuscript.
In 1978, an amateur literature researcher Stozko pointed out that this kind of writing was written in Ukrainian without vowels, but his translation (including "Little God's Eyes Fighting for Voids") was inconsistent with the illustrations in the manuscript and had nothing to do with Ukrainian history.
1987, Dr. Li Wei Tofu pointed out that this document was written by followers of Casa, which was quite popular in medieval France, and Voynich was a mixture of many languages. However, the content of Li Wei's tofu translation is also inconsistent with the Puritan doctrine of complete preservation.
In addition, when these solutions encounter the same Voynich script, they often use one translation in some parts of the manuscript and another translation in other parts. For example, Newbold's solution includes palindrome explanation of words, which is notoriously inaccurate.
For example, the word ADER can be pronounced DARE or DEAR. Most scholars believe that these methods of deciphering Voynich manuscripts are somewhat unconvincing. In addition, none of these methods can translate plaintext (understandable words) into ciphertext with the same characteristics as Voynich.
If the manuscript is not a password, will it be unknown text? Although we can't interpret the content, we can see that it has amazing regularity. For example, some of the most common words appear two or three times per line. On page 78 of the manuscript, there is such a passage: qokedyqokedy dalqokedy qokedy qokedy qokedy. This level of repetition has never appeared in any known language.
On the contrary, there are only a few phrases in Voynich, in which two or three different words will appear together regularly. These characteristics show that Voynich is unlikely to be a human language because it is so different from other languages.
Has the Voynich manuscript been proved to be a scam?
In all kinds of speculations, this voice inevitably appeared: "The manuscript is simply forged, it is just a bunch of meaningless symbols." How to identify whether a group of symbols contains information is one of the most difficult problems in knowledge research. Nevertheless, we can still find a way to identify it.
Cryptologists usually rely on statistical analysis of language. In a real password, letters are replaced by symbols, and "pairs" composed of some letters should be more common than others. For example, in English, "th" and "is" are very common combinations, and "Q" is almost always followed by "U".
Conversely, some letter pairs are rare, such as "C" and "D", but the combination of "cd" is hard to see. Scientific research believes that these principles provide a method to identify the authenticity of passwords.
Through a detailed examination of Voynich's manuscript, cryptographers found that it has a statistical model very similar to the real language. The repetition degree of letters or other symbols in a text can be expressed by a statistic "entropy". The entropy of each letter in the manuscript is roughly the same as that in Polynesian. It is impossible for the human brain to create real randomness. Voynich cipher is less random than any known European language and more regular than most natural languages.
Two of william poundstone's works were nominated for Pulitzer Prize. In his dazzling masterpiece "The Labyrinth of Reasoning", he believes that this is strong evidence to support the Voynich manuscript as a real password. He found it hard to believe that "a fake can be so accurate as to fool linguistic statistics".
Among various encryption schemes, there is a "Caesar password" named after the usage of the Roman emperor, that is, a letter is always replaced by a letter. The decipherer can easily decipher by identifying the most common letters. There are 26 kinds of Caesar codes. If you apply a different Caesar password to each letter in a password, you can design an unbreakable password, that is, a "one-time note password".
Poundstone assumes that the original Voynich manuscript is a European language based on Roman letters, in which each symbol corresponds to a letter, and the encryption method is a one-time note password. Unable to obtain the "key", he tried to check all possible encryption schemes of the manuscript with "brute force method". It's useless Because, for each letter, you need to test 26 possibilities. If the sample includes 100 symbols, the possibility of 100 power of 26 should be considered. This task cannot be completed.
To make matters more complicated, perhaps Voynich's manuscript also uses encryption methods other than Caesar's password, because there are many ways to convert letters into symbols.
Some people think that the Voynich manuscript is just a scam with complicated words. But on the other hand, if it is a scam, then the next question comes: Why did the author adopt such a complicated and laborious scam without the expected audience (that is, the creator's contemporaries)?
However, some people think that this manuscript was originally suspected to have been bought by the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II. Obviously, the author used Kadenger to fill in the text with beautiful pictures to cheat money.