"A Mysterious Medieval Manuscript, and Associated Problems"

2/21/2003: 10:30am - 12:00pm
11th Floor Large Conference Room

Abstract: The Voynich Manuscript is a beautiful illustrated, hand-lettered book dating back several hundred years. It is written in an unknown script consisting of about 20 characters, and it has never been deciphered. From the drawings, the 20,000-word book seems to be concerned with botany, medicine, and/or astrology. Kenji Yamada and I worked on techniques for automatic decipherment that could be applied to problems like Voynich, as well as to practical problems like machine translation and character encoding conversion. I'll describe some experiments we did back then, and some new techniques and experiments.

Last updated: Mon Jun 19 17:44:06 2006