Playbook for the Cult of Isis, herbal health instructions, details of the benefits of therapeutic bathing, or a written history of speaking in tongues. Probably, but not as much as most are when they come face to face with the Voynich Manuscript. That each of the above is a proposed theme for its indecipherable scribbles indicates the level of confusion. A brief meditation on the sentence "a written history of speaking in tongues" should also help you get in the confusion ballpark. Written in the early parts of the 15th century, the manuscript, a 240-page compendium of seemingly illegible and likely codified text, has amassed a proud track record of confounding scholars and eminent code breakers, including Alan Turing, alike.

Since its discovery over a hundred years ago, the 240-page Voynich manuscript, filled with seemingly coded language and inscrutable illustrations, has confounded linguists and cryptographers. Using artificial intelligence, Canadian researchers have taken a huge step forward in unraveling the document's hidden meaning. Named after Wilfrid Voynich, the Polish book dealer who procured the manuscript in 1912, the document is written in an unknown script that encodes an unknown language--a double-whammy of unknowns that has, until this point, been impossible to interpret. The Voynich manuscript contains hundreds of fragile pages, some missing, with hand-written text going from left to right. Most pages are adorned with illustrations of diagrams, including plants, nude figures, and astronomical symbols.

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.

The 240 pages of illustrations depicting dozens of naked women (and some men) in interconnected water bodies, various plants -- of which many are completely unknown -- astronomical diagrams, only some of which match the views of the sky from Earth, and accompanying text in a script that is more unidentifiable than rongorongo, are sufficient reason to count the Voynich manuscript among the most mysterious books ever written. The book is thought to have been written sometime in the early 15th century, based on carbon-dating of the vellum (animal skin especially prepared as a material to write on) it was composed on, and is named after a Polish book dealer, Wilfrid Voynich, who purchased it in 1912. Since its rediscovery over 100 years ago, there have been several attempts to decipher its contents, and the manuscript itself has been a challenge for cryptographers ever since. A page from the mysterious Voynich manuscript, which is undeciphered to this day. The latest attempt to crack its code was made by two researchers from the University of Alberta, Canada, who decided to bring in the power of artificial intelligence to help them.

Since its discovery over a hundred years ago, the 240-page Voynich manuscript, filled with seemingly coded language and inscrutable illustrations, of has confounded linguists and cryptographers. Using artificial intelligence, Canadian researchers have taken a huge step forward in unravelling the document's hidden meaning. Named after Wilfrid Voynich, the Polish book dealer who procured the manuscript in 1912, the document is written in an unknown script that encodes an unknown language - a double-whammy of unknowns that has, until this point, been impossible to interpret. The Voynich manuscript contains hundreds of fragile pages, some missing, with hand-written text going from left to right. Most pages are adorned with illustrations of diagrams, including plants, nude figures and astronomical symbols. But not for want of trying.

For centuries people have tried to decipher the meaning of the Voynich manuscript, and now a computer scientist claims to have cracked it using AI. The 600-year-old document is described as'the world's most mysterious medieval text', and is full of illustrations of exotic plants, stars, and mysterious human figures. The 240-page manual's intriguing mix of elegant writing and drawings of strange plants and naked women has some believing it holds magical powers. But even the cryptographers from Bletchley Park, the team that broke the Nazi enigma code, couldn't make sense of the manuscript. Now a computer scientist says the manuscript is written in ancient Hebrew and the code involves shuffling the order of letters in each word and dropping the vowels. While his is still to decipher its full meaning, he believes the first sentence of the text says: 'he made recommendations to the priest, man of the house and me and people.'

Researchers at the Canadian Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Edmonton this week envision a day when robots will be a mainstay in our homes and workplaces -- doing daily tasks like cooking, cleaning and even keeping us company. The AI conference, held at the University of Alberta's Lister Centre, is expected to draw hundreds of academics and industry leaders to Edmonton between May 16 and 19. "We want computers to be able to be smarter and to be able to understand [a] question, that's the first step," explained Greg Kondrak, a computer science professor at the the University of Alberta. Upon hearing a question, the smart computer would scan the internet for accurate results and "formulate the answer in a way that we kind of expect from other people." Kondrak's area of expertise is natural language processing.