In Memory of Man Podcast - Robot Crime Blog
In Memory of Man Podcast - Robot Crime Blog
The Voynich Manuscript: Cracked With a Brute-Force Attack in a Weekend"
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600 years of cryptographers couldn't read the Voynich Manuscript. A weekend brute-force attack cracked it. It's a medieval drug manual. Six plants identified, including Cannabis on folio 16r. Full proof, free, public domain →
Imagine inventing this incredibly complex uh twenty-two character secret alphabet. Oh yeah you spend years, I mean literally years perfecting the cryptography. You write hundreds of pages of beautifully illustrated, completely impenetrable code.
SPEAKER_00Right.
SPEAKER_01And what is the grand universe altering secret you're trying to hide? It's uh the recipe for a medieval cilantro hangover cure.
SPEAKER_00Which is just so incredibly human, honestly.
SPEAKER_01It really is. Now, for those of you who have been obsessively following the saga of Yale Benecki MS408, well, better known to the world as the Voinage manuscript, you already know the stakes here.
SPEAKER_00Oh, absolutely.
SPEAKER_01We aren't going to rehash all the centuries of bizarre theories about, you know, aliens or time travelers.
SPEAKER_00Thankfully, let's skip the aliens.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, exactly. Instead, our mission for this deep dive is to explore a brand new document. It's dated today, actually, June 20, 2026. And this paper claims to present the most complete computational decipherment of the Voynich manuscript ever produced in a single session.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Powell And honestly, this document truly reshapes our entire understanding of the text. Yeah, I mean, what we are looking at isn't just another fringe theory. It is this massive multidisciplinary synthesis. You have computational linguistics, advanced paleography, and vision AI, and they've all like finally converged.
SPEAKER_01Which is wild.
SPEAKER_00It is. The researchers have provided a functional 22-glyph cipher key, and it actually allows us to read real 15th-century botanical remedies that have been locked away for what 600 years.
SPEAKER_01Okay, so let's unpack this because anytime someone claims to have, quote, cracked the voyage, the entire cryptography community just collectively rolls its eyes.
SPEAKER_00Oh, yeah. They groan loudly. Right.
SPEAKER_01We've all seen the graveyard of failed translations, and the biggest trap cryptographers fall into is, well, it's apaphenia.
SPEAKER_00The human brain's desperate desire to see patterns and random noise.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. If I stare at a TV scream full of static long enough, I mean eventually I'm going to see a face. Yeah, you will. So before we even talk about the cipher key itself, we have to look at how this new 2026 computational analysis mathematically guarantees that the manuscript isn't just some elaborate empty hoax, like a locked box with nothing inside.
SPEAKER_00Well, this raises a really important question. How do we identify the ghost of a real language using nothing but mathematics? Like completely stripping away human bias. Right. The researchers tackled this by feeding just an unprecedented data set into their models. We are talking about um 37,919 word tokens. Wow. That's a lot. Yeah, comprising over 8,000 unique words. And all of them constructed from this bizarre 22-character alphabet that they call the EVA glyphs.
SPEAKER_01But you know, just having a lot of words doesn't mean those words actually mean anything. I could generate 30,000 random strings of letters on my keyboard right now, and it would just be complete gibberish.
SPEAKER_00Precisely. Which is why they utilized a core cryptographic metric. It's known as the index of coincidence or IC.
SPEAKER_01Okay, break that down for us.
SPEAKER_00So to understand the IC, you have to think about the mechanical structure of natural language. If you throw, say, a thousand scrabble tiles on the floor, the distribution of those letters is essentially flat and random.
SPEAKER_01Right. It's just a mess. Right.
SPEAKER_00The IC of completely random gibberish sits at about 0.038. But human languages are clumpy.
SPEAKER_01Clumpy.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Clumpy. We have syntax. In English, the letter E appears constantly. Q is almost always followed by U, and certain suffixes just repeat endlessly. Aaron Ross Powell Right.
SPEAKER_01So a higher index of coincidence means the text is more rigidly structured. It's like clumped together in predictable human ways.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. So for context, standard Italian has an IC of.00738.
SPEAKER_01Okay.
SPEAKER_00The Voinish manuscript has an IC of.0771.
SPEAKER_01Wait, wait. So the voinish script is actually more structured than natural Italian.
SPEAKER_00Yes. And that is a massive clue about the underlying dialect and also the nature of the cipher itself.
SPEAKER_01That's fascinating.
SPEAKER_00It really is. But the true nail in the coffin for the whole hoax theory is what happens when you test the periodic index of coincidence.
SPEAKER_01The periodic IC.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. If a Renaissance trickster was using a polyalphabetic cipher-like, say a visioneer cipher, where the translation alphabet constantly shifts using a hidden keyword just to confuse code breakers, the periodic IC graph would show massive spikes and valleys.
SPEAKER_01It would be all over the place.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. But the voinish graph is completely flat. It stays right at.077. This proves mathematically that we are dealing with a direct substitution cipher.
SPEAKER_01A substitution cipher where one voinage symbol essentially equals one Latin letter. Right. But wait, if it's just a simple substitution, why hasn't frequency analysis cracked it before? I mean, people have been trying for decades.
SPEAKER_00Because the grammar rules are highly specialized. Look at the phonetic mapping they discovered. In the manuscript, 42.7% of the words end in a specific glyph that kind of looks like the letter Y. Okay. If you map that mathematically, it perfectly matches the frequency of Italian words ending in the consonant N, like con or non.
SPEAKER_01But wait, standard Italian words almost always end in vowels. You know, pizza, roma, spaghetti. Why would nearly half the words end in a consonant?
SPEAKER_00Uh, because we aren't looking at modern standardized Italian.
SPEAKER_01Oh, I see.
SPEAKER_00We are looking at a 15th century northern Italian dialect. So perhaps Venetian or Lombard. And in those dialects, dropping the final vowel, which is called apicope, was incredibly common.
SPEAKER_01Okay, that makes sense.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And when you combine that dialectical quirk with highly specialized botanical abbreviations, standard frequency analysis models just break down completely.
SPEAKER_01That is absolutely brilliant. I mean, the math proves the room exists and it even tells us the shape of the room.
SPEAKER_00It does.
SPEAKER_01But math alone doesn't turn on the lights. You still need a wedge to physically pry the cipher open.
SPEAKER_00Right. You need a way in, a starting point that anchors all the rest of the 22 glyphs.
SPEAKER_01And here's where it gets really interesting for you listening.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Because the wedge that cracked this entire 600-year-old mystery came down to a single two-letter substitution.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, just two letters.
SPEAKER_01The researchers hypothesized that the vointage digraph, Cho, which by the way, appears everywhere in the text, translates to the letter V or U. And they didn't just guess this. It was a collision of totally independent disciplines, all pointing at the exact same conclusion.
SPEAKER_00It's the ultimate convergence of evidence. I mean, computationally, when they fed the rule chi equals V or U into the database, it immediately produced double the amount of direct 15th century Italian word matches compared to any other vowel or consonant substitution.
SPEAKER_01Wow.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it was a statistical runaway winner.
SPEAKER_01But they didn't just rely on the supercomputers, right? They actually look at the physical pen strokes on the vellum.
SPEAKER_00Right, the paleographic evidence. Years before this computational model even existed, an independent researcher named Pelling published a visual shape analysis. Okay. By studying how the medieval quill actually moved across the page, he demonstrated that the Chocoliff was a stylized evolutionary mutation of the Latin letters U and V.
SPEAKER_01That is so cool.
SPEAKER_00And mathematically, this digraph makes up about 6.8% of all manuscript characters, which beautifully, perfectly mirrors the combined 5.1% frequency of V and U in standard Italian botanical texts.
SPEAKER_01I just love when handwriting analysis and supercomputers arrive at the exact same answer.
SPEAKER_00It's so satisfying.
SPEAKER_01But you know, to prove it, you have to actually apply the substitution to the text and see if it yields anything functional.
SPEAKER_00And it did. Once they established that troll operates as V or U, the vocabulary of a 15th-century apothecary just began to emerge from the noise.
SPEAKER_01Just started pouring out.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. The manuscript word chol decoded to vowel, pointing toward Balerian root. The string shea translated to vin, indicating wine or vinca. Oh wow. But the absolute confirmation, like the definitive Rosetta Stone of the Voinish manuscript, is found on a very specific page designated as folio F9V.
SPEAKER_01Yes, the Viola page. I love this part. Walk us through how this specific illustration acted as the key, because the way multiple disciplines collided here is just so incredibly satisfying for anyone who loves problem solving.
SPEAKER_00So on this folio, there is a vibrant, deeply detailed illustration of a plant. Decades ago, human botanists identified the drawing as viola tricolor, commonly known as heartsees. Right. Recently, advanced vision AI models analyzed the specific botanical morphology. So the blue-violet five-petaled flowers, the loof structure, and the AI independently corroborated that it belonged to the Barago or Antusa family, which firmly aligns with the viola identification.
SPEAKER_01So the human experts and the AI both totally agree. We're definitely looking at a drawing of a viol.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. And directly adjacent to that flower, the very first word in the enciphered text reads C-H-E-O-L.
SPEAKER_01And when you apply the wedge?
SPEAKER_00When you apply the cryptographic wedge, E fai becomes V. The E maps phonetically to I, the O remains O, and the L remains L. So C E O decodes flawlessly to viol, the Latin and Italian root for viola.
SPEAKER_01Boom. That one four-letter word just clicks the entire lock open.
SPEAKER_00It really does.
SPEAKER_01Because if you know that word is V-O-L, you can reverse engineer the surrounding characters and suddenly the cipher just cascades. Yep.
SPEAKER_00It all unravels.
SPEAKER_01Armed with this key, the Voinich manuscript completely sheds its reputation as some esoteric magical puzzle from another dimension. It transforms into an intensely practical pharmaceutical formulary.
SPEAKER_00An incredibly grounded functional manual for a practicing renaissance physician. And the researchers proved this by running their decoded translations against the gold standard of historical medicine, Diascorides' De Materia Medica, which was basically the absolute authority on pharmacology for over a millennium.
SPEAKER_01Okay, so let's talk about the actual medicine, because this is where the cipher hits the real world. And I really want to know what this 15th century doctor was prescribing. Let's start with some of the safer everyday remedies.
SPEAKER_00A perfect example is their translation of the Valerian page. Valerian, which the manuscript decodes as Val, was highly regarded in the medieval world as all heel.
SPEAKER_01All heal. I like that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it was primarily prescribed for insomnia, severe anxiety, and nerve pain. And what's remarkable is how safe and practical the application is. Yeah. The text aligns beautifully with the teachings of the Salernatin Medical School, which was the first and most prominent medical school in medieval Europe. They advised preparing valerian via cold water maceration. And the dosage instructions even translate to a highly pragmatic standard, basically use as much as fits in three fingers.
SPEAKER_01I love that. The idea of a medieval doctor writing encrypted, super secret prescriptions that essentially just say, you know, take three fingers of this route and call me in the morning. It's so deeply human.
SPEAKER_00It really grounds the whole thing, doesn't it?
SPEAKER_01It does. And you see that same highly specific dosing with the centauri plant, right?
SPEAKER_00Yes, centauri, which they decoded with about 70% confidence. It was utilized as a powerful stiptic for lacerations and snake bites. Okay. The linguistic decoding here is fascinating because a researcher named Bax had previously translated the raw text as C.H. iron.
SPEAKER_01Chiron. Wait, like the mythological centaur?
SPEAKER_00Exactly. The mythological centaur Chiron was said to have healed Hercules with this very plant, which is literally why we call it Centauri today.
SPEAKER_01That is amazing.
SPEAKER_00And the Voynage text offers an incredibly strict dosage. Two drams of the root infused in wine. It's actually one of the few instances where Dioscorides himself demanded such explicit measurements.
SPEAKER_01But the medieval medicine cabinet gets a lot darker and honestly a lot more dangerous when you look at the treatments for things like intestinal parasites.
SPEAKER_00Oh yes.
SPEAKER_01Which brings us back to my favorite bizarre hook from this research, the encrypted cilantro.
SPEAKER_00Ah, yes. Coriandrum setivum or coriander. So that vision AI and the linguist analysis perfectly agreed on the deeply pinnate lacy leaves and compound umbells shown in the manuscript. And the decoded Italian text instructs the physician to utilize the ways of wine of the plant, which indicates a really potent alcoholic extraction.
SPEAKER_01Okay, but we use coriander in tacos today. Why would a doctor bother encrypting a recipe for cilantro wine?
SPEAKER_00Because in the 15th century, they weren't just like sprinkling leaves on their food, they were utilizing primitive alembics to distill incredibly concentrated essential oils and decoctions.
SPEAKER_01They did this to aggressively kill internal parasites and fungal infections. And if you extract coriander at that magnitude, it completely crosses the threshold from medicine to poison.
SPEAKER_00Yikes.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Diascortes explicitly warns that an excess dose of concentrated coriander causes severe amnesia, violent confusion, and even death.
SPEAKER_00So you aren't just hiding a recipe, you are hiding a highly toxic manufacturing process.
SPEAKER_01Exactly.
SPEAKER_00That makes a lot of sense. But the decipherment of these plants isn't always smooth sailing, right? There's some massive academic friction in this document when the Vision AI and the linguists actually start bumping heads.
SPEAKER_01Yes, and we cannot ignore this conflict because it really highlights how volatile this translation process remains. Right. Take the folio that the Vision AI confidently identified as cannabis sativa. The AI analyzed the palmate compound leaves with seven to nine leaflets, the tuberous root, and the reddish berry clusters, and it flagged it as hemp with 80% confidence.
SPEAKER_00And what was the prescribed use for that? Pain, inflammation, insomnia, and muscle spasms, treated by crushing the seeds in wine, which perfectly tracks with historical texts warning that excessive use, quote, dulls the senses.
SPEAKER_01Makes sense.
SPEAKER_00However, an incredibly respected linguist named Bax heavily contested this. Bax looked at the unenciphered Arabic text on that exact same page, which just plainly reads, ARR. AR. Yeah. And in medieval Arabic medicine, ARR refers to juniper or cypress.
SPEAKER_01Oh. So the AI is telling us we are looking at a picture of weed, essentially. But the actual text on the page says juniper. Why the massive clash? Is the AI just struggling to parse these highly stylized, weirdly proportioned 15th-century doodles?
SPEAKER_00Well, that is certainly one plausible explanation. I mean, the Sheen Vision is trained on photographs of real anatomically correct plants, right? Not surrealist Renaissance watercolors. Right, right. But there is another, much more fascinating possibility: intentional steganography.
SPEAKER_01Wait, you mean the author deliberately mismatched the text and the images as like an intellectual booby trap?
SPEAKER_00Exactly. Think about it. If you are a physician trying to protect your proprietary parasite cures and pain relievers from rival doctors, you might draw a picture of a climbing vine like Brayonia, which the AI actually spotted on another contentious page. Okay. But then you label it with the Arabic word Kaur, meaning blackseed. If a rival doctor steals your book and follows the picture, they might accidentally kill their patient with toxic braonia instead of healing them with black seed.
SPEAKER_01Oh wow. If we connect this to the bigger picture, that theory perfectly sets up the broader mystery of the manuscript. Yight because it begs the question, who was this person?
SPEAKER_00Right.
SPEAKER_01We know it's not a hoax now, we know it's functional, sometimes highly dangerous medicine. But who goes to the immense trouble of inventing an entirely new cryptographic alphabet just to write down plant recipes?
SPEAKER_00Well, based on the linguistic and historical data, the researchers have proposed a hypothesized author profile, though they assign it a pretty modest 55% confidence rating.
SPEAKER_01Fair enough.
SPEAKER_00They believe the author was an Italian Jewish physician operating in the early 15th century.
SPEAKER_01Walk us through the reasoning there, because the evidence for that is surprisingly compelling.
SPEAKER_00It really comes down to what is present in the text and what is glaringly absent.
SPEAKER_01Okay.
SPEAKER_00First, look at the ingredients of the language itself. The underlying grammar relies heavily on foundational Italian prepositions. Words decoding to dela, dal di.
SPEAKER_01Italian foundations got it.
SPEAKER_00Yet the medical terminology is deeply infused with raw Arabic, utilizing terms from towering Islamic medical texts like Abacina's canon of medicine.
SPEAKER_01So it's basically this melting pot of European and Middle Eastern science.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. But the most staggering piece of evidence is the visual context. Across 214 pages of an illustrated manuscript produced in early 1400s Europe, there is a total, absolute absence of Christian iconography.
SPEAKER_01Really? None at all.
SPEAKER_00None. There are no crosses, no saints, no subtle nods to the Catholic Church whatsoever. For medieval European document, that is almost statistically impossible, unless the author operated completely outside that dominant religious structure.
SPEAKER_01Right. An Italian Jewish physician would be uniquely positioned to absorb the Greek texts of Dioscortes, the Arabic mastery of Avicenna, and the local Italian herbal traditions, all while remaining culturally distinct from the Catholic hegemony.
SPEAKER_00Exactly.
SPEAKER_01And in the Renaissance, medical knowledge wasn't just some open source public good, it was raw economic power. If you had a unique, effective treatment for a wealthy merchant's gout or a nobleman's insomnia, that was a highly lucrative trade secret.
SPEAKER_00It was intellectual property. And you protected your intellectual property with a cipher.
SPEAKER_01So what does this all mean? When you pull back the curtain, the Voyage manuscript is simply the incredibly practical, heavily encrypted notebook of a multilingual physician who was just trying to maintain his competitive edge.
SPEAKER_00Pretty much, yeah.
SPEAKER_01But before we get too celebratory about cracking the case, we have to inject a pretty heavy dose of reality into this deep dive.
SPEAKER_00Yes, we do. And to be fair, the researchers themselves are remarkably transparent about this limitation. The reality is no one has fully translated the Voynich manuscript. Not even close.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that is the crucial caveat here.
SPEAKER_00The manuscript contains 5,137 lines of text. Using this newly discovered computational key, the team has only been able to produce readable, coherent, syntactically correct Italian for 272 of those lines.
SPEAKER_01Wow, so we haven't emptied the save at all. We've just managed to shine a flashlight on the very first stack of papers sitting right by the door.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. The vast majority of the vault is still completely shrouded in darkness.
SPEAKER_01And what's fascinating here is a lingering puzzle pulled directly from the data, a bizarre paradox that the researchers highlight, which completely upbands our understanding of why this book was even written.
SPEAKER_00Oh, this is the best part.
SPEAKER_01Lay it on us.
SPEAKER_00So throughout the manuscript, the author writes down specific Arabic and Persian plant names, like AR for juniper or KAR for black seed, but they don't encrypt them. Wait. Those vital exotic medical terms are left entirely unenciphered. They're just written as raw labels directly on the page.
SPEAKER_01Wait, wait. So the most important active ingredients, the exotic foreign medicines, are just sitting there in plain text for literally anyone to read?
SPEAKER_00Yes. But the mundane, everyday Italian words, the simple verbs, the prepositions like of or from, those are hidden behind a maddeningly complex, mathematically rigid, 22-glyph computational cipher.
SPEAKER_01That makes absolutely no logical sense. I mean, if your entire goal is to protect your valuable medical recipes, why would you leave the critical active ingredients completely readable but then go to the exhausting trouble of encrypting the word wine?
SPEAKER_00It's baffling.
SPEAKER_01It really forces you to ask a very strange question about the author's true intent.
SPEAKER_00It does. Was this brilliant cryptographic system actually designed to hide the medicine? Or was the medicine just the unencrypted wrapper? Like a mundane distraction meant to divert our attention from whatever else is hidden in the 4,800 lines of text that we still cannot read.
SPEAKER_01Talk about a chilling thought. You finally crack the lock safe, you pull open the heavy metal door, and you realize the blueprints inside are for an entirely different building. Well, we will leave you to mull over that paradox on your own. Thanks for joining us, and we'll catch you on the next deep dive.