I'm so happy to see Nick Collins taking this on. If you haven't seen his book, Handmade Music, it's an excellent book for music projects. This contribution looks exceptional as well.
I was reading up on the author and saw this interesting bit[0]:
> An algorave (from an algorithm and rave) is an event where people dance to music generated from algorithms, often using live coding techniques. Alex McLean of Slub and Nick Collins coined the word "algorave" in 2011, and the first event under such a name was organised in London, England. It has since become a movement, with algoraves taking place around the world.
Most agree that this is not a real solution. Many of the pages translate to nonsense using that scheme, and some of the figures included in the paper don't actually come from the Voynich manuscript in the first place.
I'm not really following the research, so it's rather a lazy question (assuming you do): does any of it follow the path Derek Vogt was suggesting in his (kinda famous) videos (that he deleted for some reason)? I remember when I was watching them, it felt so convincing I thought "Alright, it looks like there must be a short leap to the actual solution now."
Yet 10 years later I still hear that the consensus is that there's no agreeable translation. So, what, all this mandaic-gypsies was nothing? And all coincidences were… coincidences?
If you spend some time working on Voynich yourself you'll find that it's actually fairly doable to come up with some translation where you can find a few words that seem to agree with each other. And when you allow yourself some permissions like unorthodox spellings or characters that can mean different things in different places, then it's not so hard to even be able to 'translate' a few seemingly reasonable sentences. This gives a lot of hope to the translator and any who follow them
So far none of these ideas have been shown to be applicable to the full text though. What you would expect with a real translation is that the further you get with your translation, the easier it becomes to translate more. But with the attempts so far is that we keep seeing that it becomes more and more difficult to pretend that other pages are just as translatable using the same scheme you came up initially. It eventually just dies a quiet death
I love how now this issue is alright to talk about on hacker news. For some reason when it was happening and all of the alarms were going off, it was banned content on hacker news. Technology is inherently political with political ramifications. -_-
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