Applicability of AZdecrypt to Voynich?

[MichelleL11]

This is the program written by Dave Oranchak collaborator, Jarl Van Eycke, a Belgian computer scientist that helped with the recent cracking of Zodiac's 340 code.


See thread:

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Here are links to the downloadable version and a web version.

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and a web version:

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It seems this program assumes that the code is a homophonic cipher -- so are we back to the same issue with the Voynich that this seems unlikely?

I'm interested in any comments anyone has about how this tool could be used to crack our mystery, too.

[Anton]

My knowledge of this tool is zero, but I guess it at least assumes that the cipher stream is a sequence of symbols of an apriori fixed alphabet. With Voynichese, there are some things which are hardly accounted for at the alphabet level - such as the gallows coverage.

[Koen G]

Parsing ;(
Using such tools is easier when your characters are neat, separate symbols.

[farmerjohn]

More on how the program works can found You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

To apply this tool one needs to know at least:
1) underlying language
2) cipher used
3) how to properly transcribe the text

1) here one can try many languages - difficult, but possible. AZdecrypt uses 8-grams, so authors processed terabytes of text collect stats. That's too much for any medieval language, but we probably can downgrade to 6-, 5- or 4-grams, thus needing much less sample texts (VMS is longer than other challenges, so less precise model is acceptable).

2) AZdecrypt is extremely powerful when working with one-to-many ciphers. However Voynich may be abjadic and may contain nulls. Number of possibilities here may grow exponentially

3) almost noone believes that for example "cth" is actually "c"+"t"+"h". So before feeding Voynich text to the tool one needs to do some transformations. A lot of variants to test here.

[Anton]

I'd be interested to see if this tool can help e.g. with Dorabella

[-JKP-]

I don't know if the tool would help with the VMS (maybe if some pre-processing was done, but it's still a challenge to figure out how to approach that) but I agree that it might be quite effective with the Dorabella cipher.

[Ruby Novacna]

A lot of variants to test here.

Precisely, a computer could test many more possibilities than the fans advancing in scattered rows.