Writing in an enigmatic alphabet and incomprehensible language became a challenge for cryptographers, historians and archaeologists
Computer scientists from the University of Alberta have turned to Artificial Intelligence and then to Google Translator to decipher the Voynich manuscript, written in an unknown alphabet and an incomprehensible language until now.
This enigmatic 15th century anonymous text has baffled historians and cryptographers since its discovery in the 19th century. The succession of failures in its translation had turned the manuscript into the Holy Grail of historical cryptography.
Recently, the professor of computer science at the University of Alberta, Greg Kondrak, an expert in natural language processing and graduate student Bradley Hauer, used artificial intelligence to decipher ambiguities in human language using the Voynich manuscript as case study.
His first step was to address the language of origin, which is encrypted in hundreds of delicate pages of vellum, cowhide, with attached illustrations.
Kondrak and Hauer used samples from 400 different languages of the "Universal Declaration of Human Rights" to systematically identify the language. Initially they hypothesized that Voynich's manuscript was written in Arabic, but after running its algorithms, it turned out that the most likely language is Hebrew.
"That was amazing," Kondrak said. "And just saying this is Hebrew is the first step, the next is how to decipher it."
Kondrak and Hauer hypothesized that the manuscript was created using alphagrams, defining one sentence with another, exemplary of the ambiguities in human language. Assuming that, they tried to find an algorithm to decipher that type of encoded text.
"It turned out that over 80% of the words were in a Hebrew dictionary, but we did not know if they made sense together," Kondrak said.
After searching unsuccessfully for Hebrew scholars to validate their findings, the scientists turned to the Google Translator .
