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This is a bad article like most mainstream media writing on ML/AI. The original is a bit better and has an interview with him: https://globalnews.ca/news/398478

This is a bad article like most mainstream media writing on ML/AI. The original is a bit better and has an interview with him: https://globalnews.ca/news/3984789/voynich-manuscript-computer-decipher-alberta/ https://globalnews.ca/news/3984789/voynich-manuscript-comput... He only claims to have potentially identified the document's language as a form of Hebrew using a language detection model trained on UN documents. That let him incidentally decipher a few lines by literally typing them into Google Translate, but he doesn't claim to be an expert on Hebrew or have the ability to translate the whole document. He's looking for Hebrew experts to test his theory. But by the time the story makes it into it's third re-write on a chain of bad news websites, it's "Man claims his AI deciphers unbreakable code that stumped Enigma codebreakers" or whatever.

DonaldFisk 9y ago
The articles in the Canadian press are just clickbait. Their paper is https://transacl.org/ojs/index.php/tacl/article/view/821/174 https://transacl.org/ojs/index.php/tacl/article/view/821/174 and the claims are somewhat more modest. The language identification method they use (does it count as AI?) assumes that the Voynich Manuscript text is in a language they check for, the words of which may have been anagrammed. There is no consensus that this is the case. The Voynich Manuscript could be entirely meaningless, or encrypted using a different mechanism, or be written in a language they don't check for. They then find the closest match. The use of anagrams adds an extra degree of freedom, which makes finding spurious matches more likely. So they identified Hebrew, which is at least plausible. They then translate one line of the manuscript, using Google Translate, into English. There was no control. They should have applied their method to text known to be meaningless, and questioned their approach if meaning was found. Gordon Rugg (whom they cite) and myself (here: http://web.onetel.com/~hibou/voynich/generated-voynich-manuscript.html http://web.onetel.com/~hibou/voynich/generated-voynich-manus... ) have generated meaningless Voynichese text. I haven't applied their entire approach, but Google Translate translates the first line of my generated manuscript, when the language is identified as Bengali, as "Do not worry about the fact that the person is very friendly".
- sekh60 9y ago
  Brb, writing an article about how Gordon Rugg and Donald Fisk's previously thought-to-be-meaningless text was deciphered by an AI. Did they channel ancient Bengali spirits when writing it? Read more to find out.
sctb 9y ago
Thanks, we've updated the link from http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/ai-deciphers-mysterious-15th-century-manuscript-that-no-other-human-could-so-far-1656746 http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/ai-deciphers-mysterious-15th-centur....

DonaldFisk 9y ago

The articles in the Canadian press are just clickbait. Their paper is https://transacl.org/ojs/index.php/tacl/article/view/821/174 https://transacl.org/ojs/index.php/tacl/article/view/821/174 and the claims are somewhat more modest. The language identification method they use (does it count as AI?) assumes that the Voynich Manuscript text is in a language they check for, the words of which may have been anagrammed. There is no consensus that this is the case. The Voynich Manuscript could be entirely meaningless, or encrypted using a different mechanism, or be written in a language they don't check for. They then find the closest match. The use of anagrams adds an extra degree of freedom, which makes finding spurious matches more likely. So they identified Hebrew, which is at least plausible. They then translate one line of the manuscript, using Google Translate, into English. There was no control. They should have applied their method to text known to be meaningless, and questioned their approach if meaning was found. Gordon Rugg (whom they cite) and myself (here: http://web.onetel.com/~hibou/voynich/generated-voynich-manuscript.html http://web.onetel.com/~hibou/voynich/generated-voynich-manus... ) have generated meaningless Voynichese text. I haven't applied their entire approach, but Google Translate translates the first line of my generated manuscript, when the language is identified as Bengali, as "Do not worry about the fact that the person is very friendly".

sekh60 9y ago
Brb, writing an article about how Gordon Rugg and Donald Fisk's previously thought-to-be-meaningless text was deciphered by an AI. Did they channel ancient Bengali spirits when writing it? Read more to find out.

sctb 9y ago

Thanks, we've updated the link from http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/ai-deciphers-mysterious-15th-century-manuscript-that-no-other-human-could-so-far-1656746 http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/ai-deciphers-mysterious-15th-centur....