Has Artificial Intelligence Cracked the Voynich Manuscript's Mysterious Code?

An emotional investment in the Voynich manuscript offers little in the way of return. For hundreds of years, this 15th-century document full of indecipherable writing and cryptic illustrations has sat dark and inscrutable. Attempts to figure out its code tend to be swiftly debunked by the scholarly community, whether they're as sensible-seeming as "It's a woman's health manual!" or as outlandish as "I think an alien did it." Alan Turing and the Bletchley Park team's attempts to decode it were unsuccessful. Now, at the University of Alberta, Canada, researchers have taken a new tack to try to illuminate the manuscript, named for 19th-century Polish bookseller Wilfrid Voynich.