10 ms·

Facsimile of the Voynich Manuscript Now Available to Citizen Cryptographers

110 points by misnamed 10y ago

nkurz 10y ago
If you are looking to get this as a Christmas gift, note that there are actually two versions of the Voynich Manuscript being published this year. The one mentioned here is a photographic reproduction done by the Yale Press, and is available from major sellers like Amazon for a reasonable price: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0300217234 https://www.amazon.com/dp/0300217234 The other is a little more exotic. The Spanish publisher Siloé has been authorized to make a limited-edition 'look and feel' replica. They will handmake 898 full facsimiles, down to the wormholes in the pages. The expected price is €7,000-8,000. So if you are asking for a copy for Christmas, make sure to be be specific to avoid a (possibly) disappointing surprise! http://blog.siloe.es/siloe-editara-la-replica-del-manuscrito-voynich/ http://blog.siloe.es/siloe-editara-la-replica-del-manuscrito... http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/21/voynich-manuscript-exact-replicas-to-be-made-of-worlds-most-myst/ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/21/voynich-manuscrip...
- kybernetyk 10y ago
  >The Spanish publisher Siloé has been authorized Authorized by whom? I mean there's surely no copyright protection for the original anymore. (I hope at least but you never know).
  - jwdunne 10y ago
    With a manuscript that old, you'd need authorisation to look at it so you can see all the worm holes and artifacts.
    - jonathankoren 10y ago
      Authorization to maintain the integrity of the artifact yes. Authorization to publish a copy of it? No. High resolution PDFs are freely available[0] and there already exists a crappy bound edition of these PDFs[1]. (Do not buy the linked to book. It's very subpar. Multipage foldouts are shrunk-to-fit, and there's no accompany text. It's literally, just the archive.org images printed and bound.) [0] https://archive.org/details/TheVoynichManuscript https://archive.org/details/TheVoynichManuscript [1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1599865556/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1599865556/ref=oh_aui_deta...
      - jwdunne 10y ago
        Yeah but my point is that it will be pretty hard to produce a replica where you charge thousands per book with just a high resolution PDF alone. You want to see how the book looks in 3D, in real lighting and at different angles. A PDF cannot convey how that will look. The only way to produce a high quality replica is to look at the real thing and work to match how it really is. They would need authorisation for that access.
        jonathankoren 10y ago
        Yeah but that still doesn't mean that Yale Library authorized the production of the the replica. They authorized access to the original. Nothing more. I can go to any library or museum and once granted access do anything I want with the data I acquire. Now granted, they may be curious about why I wanted access, and maybe I'd even do it under supervision in order to mitigate damage, but the data and the manifestation of that data becomes my own original transformative creative work. The library doesn't own it, or even a part of it, unless a specific agreement was made regarding that.
  - nkurz 10y ago
    I'm not sure of the exact arrangement, but I presume that Yale University's Beinecke Library had them sign a contract in return for the physical access to the book, and that contract put conditions on how many books they were going to create. Copyright of copies of public domain artworks is odd: the original artwork is not under copyright, but a photo (and possibly a scan?) of the artwork can be. The US legal theory (I don't know about elsewhere) is that a photo of a public domain artwork can itself be an artistic creation, deserving of separate protection. For example, the photographer might have made an artistic choice to use a diffuse white light without glare, to have the entire frame in focus, and to crop the photo at the edge of the artwork. It is commonly thought that a mechanistic scan fails to meet this ridiculously low threshold of creativity, but this defense has not been well tested in the courts. So in the absence of a contractual agreement to the contrary, if you make a copy directly from the original, you are likely legal. But if you made a reproduction from a reproduction that could be considered itself an artistic work, you could be infringing on the copyright of that reproduction. I don't know what the rule would be for making a copy of an authorized "slavish" physical reproduction, but given the low bar for copyright, I'd guess it would still be considered infringement? Anyway, here's an overview of the legal situation in the US: http://blogs.library.duke.edu/scholcomm/2013/06/14/museums-can-get-copyright-right/ http://blogs.library.duke.edu/scholcomm/2013/06/14/museums-c... Here's a link to someone who went ahead and created his own physical version from the published scans, printed on a color laser printer, then 'aged' by dunking them in coffee: http://scienceblogs.de/klausis-krypto-kolumne/2016/08/27/publisher-wins-rights-to-voynich-manuscript/ http://scienceblogs.de/klausis-krypto-kolumne/2016/08/27/pub... Here's a link with a little bit more detail about the arrangement between the publisher and the library: http://www.thelocal.es/20160821/tiny-spanish-publisher-clones-worlds-most-mysterious-book http://www.thelocal.es/20160821/tiny-spanish-publisher-clone... Finally here's the page about the Manuscript on the publisher's website, which might have more information if you read Spanish: http://voynich.siloe.es/manuscrito/ http://voynich.siloe.es/manuscrito/
    - sethish 10y ago
      > Copyright of copies of public domain artworks is odd: the original artwork is not under copyright, but a photo (and possibly a scan?) This is often claimed by rights holders, but not generally true. The copy must be transformative and have distinct artistic merit. Basically any scan/photo that I/you/we would want from the owner of the book would not be copyrightable.
  - jay-anderson 10y ago
    It is public domain, but as others have said the owner or library is likely using contract law to force some restrictions. The book 'Copyfraud' is good read to get some more info about what's going on here (http://www.copyfraud.com/ http://www.copyfraud.com/).
TeMPOraL 10y ago
I still haven't heard of a better theory explaining Voynich Manuscript than this one: https://xkcd.com/593/ https://xkcd.com/593/.
vcool07 10y ago
This is one of the most fascinating unsolved puzzles I've read about. I like to believe in the "alien" theory although it seems the least probable :)
ideonexus 10y ago
I'm not sure how a photo-print of the manuscript will help cryptographers. Doesn't the digital version available at archive.org provide better opportunities for analysis? https://archive.org/details/TheVoynichManuscript https://archive.org/details/TheVoynichManuscript For example, a friend of mine is fascinated with the Zodiac Killer's unsolved ciphers, so he put the note into a program, where you can replace the cryptic symbols in the serial killer's note with various letters: http://www.oranchak.com/zodiac/webtoy/ http://www.oranchak.com/zodiac/webtoy/ A printed-book of the Voynich Manuscript--to my mind--actually reduces the ability of cryptographers to decode it (if there's even anything there to actually decode[1]). I would love to see the symbols in this book broken out into a font where we can run statistics on them, replace them with various letters from different alphabets, and seek patterns in their occurrence. [1] An analysis of the manuscript found the distribution of words " is not compatible with natural languages": https://arxiv.org/abs/1601.07435 https://arxiv.org/abs/1601.07435
- dagw 10y ago
  A printed-book of the Voynich Manuscript--to my mind--actually reduces the ability of cryptographers to decode it Only if you assume that choice of layout, spacing, character size, colors, relative positioning of text and illustrations etc. etc. aren't an integral part of the whole message.
- codingdave 10y ago
  > I would love to see the symbols in this book broken out into a font where we can run statistics on them, replace them with various letters from different alphabets, and seek patterns in their occurrence. Odds are, if there was a 1-to-1 relationship between symbols and letters, someone would have figured it out by now. So a font may be statistically interesting, but probably not a major tool towards solving the puzzle.
  - reitoei 10y ago
    Username checks out
- coldpie 10y ago
kristopolous 10y ago
Maybe I don't hang in the right circles, but has anyone done a serious look for number words? I can't imagine that document would be void of quantities, especially in the recipes section. Counting and enumeration systems can reveal a lot about where something is from.
- coldcode 10y ago
  I wonder if it is even possible to determine whether or not the writing is nonsense or an actual language.
  - schoen 10y ago
    There's a lot of research on exactly that question using various statistical tests, but some of the tests seem to have pointed in different directions. To give an example, for a written natural language, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law should generally apply to letters, words, and, I think, to n-grams as well. This is not true for encrypted or compressed data, or for data produced by a random process like throwing dice, so you can distinguish the two pretty well with histograms. The simplest tests like this generally went in favor of the Voynich manuscript having real linguistic content, but there are other statistical tests too and I'm not familiar with what they've shown. :-)
    - DonaldFisk 10y ago
      I've been studying the Voynich Manuscript. I'm using it primarily as a way of improving my statistical libraries, rather than in the expectation of being able to read it. No-one else has got very far. It has many properties of natural language, and there are two variants - Currier A and Currier B. I'm working on the assumption that it's a natural language with fairly light encryption, similar to that described here: http://ciphermysteries.com/2016/07/06/fifteenth-century-cryptography http://ciphermysteries.com/2016/07/06/fifteenth-century-cryp... My initial aim is to identify the language, and to do that I need to map the glyphs onto characters. My suspicion based on the limited analysis I've done (running a PCA on the glyphs) is that it's in a dialect of German.
FuNe 10y ago
What would the explanation be according to Occam's razor here?
- CocaKoala 10y ago
  The Occam's Razor explanation has already been proposed by Randall Munroe: https://xkcd.com/593/ https://xkcd.com/593/
qwertyuiop924 10y ago
...So, anybody up for a game of Druids and Dicotyledons? Yes, everyone else already linked the strip, but I couldn't resist.

110 points by misnamed 10y ago

nkurz 10y ago

If you are looking to get this as a Christmas gift, note that there are actually two versions of the Voynich Manuscript being published this year. The one mentioned here is a photographic reproduction done by the Yale Press, and is available from major sellers like Amazon for a reasonable price: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0300217234 https://www.amazon.com/dp/0300217234 The other is a little more exotic. The Spanish publisher Siloé has been authorized to make a limited-edition 'look and feel' replica. They will handmake 898 full facsimiles, down to the wormholes in the pages. The expected price is €7,000-8,000. So if you are asking for a copy for Christmas, make sure to be be specific to avoid a (possibly) disappointing surprise! http://blog.siloe.es/siloe-editara-la-replica-del-manuscrito-voynich/ http://blog.siloe.es/siloe-editara-la-replica-del-manuscrito... http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/21/voynich-manuscript-exact-replicas-to-be-made-of-worlds-most-myst/ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/21/voynich-manuscrip...

kybernetyk 10y ago
>The Spanish publisher Siloé has been authorized Authorized by whom? I mean there's surely no copyright protection for the original anymore. (I hope at least but you never know).
- jwdunne 10y ago
  With a manuscript that old, you'd need authorisation to look at it so you can see all the worm holes and artifacts.
  - jonathankoren 10y ago
    Authorization to maintain the integrity of the artifact yes. Authorization to publish a copy of it? No. High resolution PDFs are freely available[0] and there already exists a crappy bound edition of these PDFs[1]. (Do not buy the linked to book. It's very subpar. Multipage foldouts are shrunk-to-fit, and there's no accompany text. It's literally, just the archive.org images printed and bound.) [0] https://archive.org/details/TheVoynichManuscript https://archive.org/details/TheVoynichManuscript [1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1599865556/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1599865556/ref=oh_aui_deta...
    - jwdunne 10y ago
      Yeah but my point is that it will be pretty hard to produce a replica where you charge thousands per book with just a high resolution PDF alone. You want to see how the book looks in 3D, in real lighting and at different angles. A PDF cannot convey how that will look. The only way to produce a high quality replica is to look at the real thing and work to match how it really is. They would need authorisation for that access.
      - jonathankoren 10y ago
        Yeah but that still doesn't mean that Yale Library authorized the production of the the replica. They authorized access to the original. Nothing more. I can go to any library or museum and once granted access do anything I want with the data I acquire. Now granted, they may be curious about why I wanted access, and maybe I'd even do it under supervision in order to mitigate damage, but the data and the manifestation of that data becomes my own original transformative creative work. The library doesn't own it, or even a part of it, unless a specific agreement was made regarding that.
- nkurz 10y ago
  I'm not sure of the exact arrangement, but I presume that Yale University's Beinecke Library had them sign a contract in return for the physical access to the book, and that contract put conditions on how many books they were going to create. Copyright of copies of public domain artworks is odd: the original artwork is not under copyright, but a photo (and possibly a scan?) of the artwork can be. The US legal theory (I don't know about elsewhere) is that a photo of a public domain artwork can itself be an artistic creation, deserving of separate protection. For example, the photographer might have made an artistic choice to use a diffuse white light without glare, to have the entire frame in focus, and to crop the photo at the edge of the artwork. It is commonly thought that a mechanistic scan fails to meet this ridiculously low threshold of creativity, but this defense has not been well tested in the courts. So in the absence of a contractual agreement to the contrary, if you make a copy directly from the original, you are likely legal. But if you made a reproduction from a reproduction that could be considered itself an artistic work, you could be infringing on the copyright of that reproduction. I don't know what the rule would be for making a copy of an authorized "slavish" physical reproduction, but given the low bar for copyright, I'd guess it would still be considered infringement? Anyway, here's an overview of the legal situation in the US: http://blogs.library.duke.edu/scholcomm/2013/06/14/museums-can-get-copyright-right/ http://blogs.library.duke.edu/scholcomm/2013/06/14/museums-c... Here's a link to someone who went ahead and created his own physical version from the published scans, printed on a color laser printer, then 'aged' by dunking them in coffee: http://scienceblogs.de/klausis-krypto-kolumne/2016/08/27/publisher-wins-rights-to-voynich-manuscript/ http://scienceblogs.de/klausis-krypto-kolumne/2016/08/27/pub... Here's a link with a little bit more detail about the arrangement between the publisher and the library: http://www.thelocal.es/20160821/tiny-spanish-publisher-clones-worlds-most-mysterious-book http://www.thelocal.es/20160821/tiny-spanish-publisher-clone... Finally here's the page about the Manuscript on the publisher's website, which might have more information if you read Spanish: http://voynich.siloe.es/manuscrito/ http://voynich.siloe.es/manuscrito/
  - sethish 10y ago
    > Copyright of copies of public domain artworks is odd: the original artwork is not under copyright, but a photo (and possibly a scan?) This is often claimed by rights holders, but not generally true. The copy must be transformative and have distinct artistic merit. Basically any scan/photo that I/you/we would want from the owner of the book would not be copyrightable.
- jay-anderson 10y ago
  It is public domain, but as others have said the owner or library is likely using contract law to force some restrictions. The book 'Copyfraud' is good read to get some more info about what's going on here (http://www.copyfraud.com/ http://www.copyfraud.com/).

TeMPOraL 10y ago

I still haven't heard of a better theory explaining Voynich Manuscript than this one: https://xkcd.com/593/ https://xkcd.com/593/.

vcool07 10y ago

This is one of the most fascinating unsolved puzzles I've read about. I like to believe in the "alien" theory although it seems the least probable :)

ideonexus 10y ago

I'm not sure how a photo-print of the manuscript will help cryptographers. Doesn't the digital version available at archive.org provide better opportunities for analysis? https://archive.org/details/TheVoynichManuscript https://archive.org/details/TheVoynichManuscript For example, a friend of mine is fascinated with the Zodiac Killer's unsolved ciphers, so he put the note into a program, where you can replace the cryptic symbols in the serial killer's note with various letters: http://www.oranchak.com/zodiac/webtoy/ http://www.oranchak.com/zodiac/webtoy/ A printed-book of the Voynich Manuscript--to my mind--actually reduces the ability of cryptographers to decode it (if there's even anything there to actually decode[1]). I would love to see the symbols in this book broken out into a font where we can run statistics on them, replace them with various letters from different alphabets, and seek patterns in their occurrence. [1] An analysis of the manuscript found the distribution of words " is not compatible with natural languages": https://arxiv.org/abs/1601.07435 https://arxiv.org/abs/1601.07435

dagw 10y ago
A printed-book of the Voynich Manuscript--to my mind--actually reduces the ability of cryptographers to decode it Only if you assume that choice of layout, spacing, character size, colors, relative positioning of text and illustrations etc. etc. aren't an integral part of the whole message.
codingdave 10y ago
> I would love to see the symbols in this book broken out into a font where we can run statistics on them, replace them with various letters from different alphabets, and seek patterns in their occurrence. Odds are, if there was a 1-to-1 relationship between symbols and letters, someone would have figured it out by now. So a font may be statistically interesting, but probably not a major tool towards solving the puzzle.
- reitoei 10y ago
  Username checks out
coldpie 10y ago

kristopolous 10y ago

Maybe I don't hang in the right circles, but has anyone done a serious look for number words? I can't imagine that document would be void of quantities, especially in the recipes section. Counting and enumeration systems can reveal a lot about where something is from.

coldcode 10y ago
I wonder if it is even possible to determine whether or not the writing is nonsense or an actual language.
- schoen 10y ago
  There's a lot of research on exactly that question using various statistical tests, but some of the tests seem to have pointed in different directions. To give an example, for a written natural language, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law should generally apply to letters, words, and, I think, to n-grams as well. This is not true for encrypted or compressed data, or for data produced by a random process like throwing dice, so you can distinguish the two pretty well with histograms. The simplest tests like this generally went in favor of the Voynich manuscript having real linguistic content, but there are other statistical tests too and I'm not familiar with what they've shown. :-)
  - DonaldFisk 10y ago
    I've been studying the Voynich Manuscript. I'm using it primarily as a way of improving my statistical libraries, rather than in the expectation of being able to read it. No-one else has got very far. It has many properties of natural language, and there are two variants - Currier A and Currier B. I'm working on the assumption that it's a natural language with fairly light encryption, similar to that described here: http://ciphermysteries.com/2016/07/06/fifteenth-century-cryptography http://ciphermysteries.com/2016/07/06/fifteenth-century-cryp... My initial aim is to identify the language, and to do that I need to map the glyphs onto characters. My suspicion based on the limited analysis I've done (running a PCA on the glyphs) is that it's in a dialect of German.

FuNe 10y ago

What would the explanation be according to Occam's razor here?

CocaKoala 10y ago
The Occam's Razor explanation has already been proposed by Randall Munroe: https://xkcd.com/593/ https://xkcd.com/593/

qwertyuiop924 10y ago

...So, anybody up for a game of Druids and Dicotyledons? Yes, everyone else already linked the strip, but I couldn't resist.