Sunday, March 11, 2018

More debunking of that Voynich manuscript "translation"

STILL NOT CREDIBLE: Did Artificial Intelligence Really Decode the Voynich Manuscript? Some Leading Scholars Doubt It. Scholars questioned the methodology of the paper that sparked the reports (Henri Neuendorf, artnet News).
Speaking to The Verge, professor Shlomo Argamon, a computational linguist at the Illinois Institute of Technology, concluded that “their method… gives them huge latitude in doing this sort of impressionistic interpretation. They take this decoded sentence, squint at it through thick eyeglasses, and say that’s good enough for us.” Nick Pelling, a Voynich expert who’s written several books on the mysterious document goes even further, saying that the paper’s likelihood of being correct is “So close to 0% as makes no practical difference.”
Background here and here.

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