Romanpoet wrote:
] Um, who is this guy and this method of his and WTF is he
] saying Voynich is solved? He got published in Cryptologia,
] which is something to his credit. However, to my
] understanding Voynich remains very very much unsolved.

What this guy is saying, is that he's "solved" Voynich by assuming it's a hoax, and coming up with the method that he believes that the hoax was perpetrated. If I'm recognizing the name correctly (sorry but I'm in a hurry at the moment, heading to the airport for Dragon*Con), Rugg has proposed that the Manuscript was created as gibberish, with the help of a system called Cardan Grilles.

It's an intriguing hypothesis, and may be true. My own gut says that Voynich was a hoax as well, and that it was created for the specific purpose of conning Emperor Rudolf out of several hundred gold ducats (about $30,000 in today's dollars). The Emperor was known for shelling out big bucks for intriguing curiosities, so my feeling is that the Voynich was probably created for no other reason than extracting gold from His Emperorship. ;)

But I'm not going to sign off on the Cardan Grilles method until someone can actually duplicate the technique for me. Meaning, show me a re-created grille, show me the table they used, and show me how *that* grille , and *that* table (or set of grilles and tables), could produce a reasonable-sized chunk of any page of Voynich. To my knowledge, that hasn't been done yet, though last I heard, some of the Voynich researchers were definitely trying different permutations to see what they could come up with.

If anyone has heard otherwise, or knows of a webpage that does present a specific duplication of the Grille technique to reproduce *any* of the 200-odd pages of the Voynich Manuscript, please let me know?

Heading off to the airport...

Elonka :)