Code in the 'world's most mysterious book' deciphered by AI

Artificial intelligence has allowed scientists to make significant progress in cracking a mysterious ancient text, the meaning of which has eluded scholars for centuries. Dated to the 15th century, the Voynich manuscript is a hand-written text in an unknown script, accompanied by pictures of plants, astronomical observations and nude figures. Since its discovery in the 19th century, many historians and cryptographers have attempted to unravel its meaning - including code breakers during the Second World War - but none have been successful. While some have written the Voynich manuscript off as a hoax, use of modern techniques has previously suggested the presence of "a genuine message" inside the book. Now, computer scientists at the University of Alberta have applied artificial intelligence to the text, with their first goal to establish its language of origin. They used text from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 380 languages to "train" their system and then ran their algorithms, which determined the most likely language for the document was Hebrew.