Mysterious 15th century manuscript decoded by computer scientists using artificial intelligence

Sign up for our free Health Check email to receive exclusive analysis on the week in health Get our free Health Check email Get our free Health Check email SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. By applying algorithms designed to decode such puzzles, Professor Kondrak and his graduate student Bradley Hauer were able to decipher a relatively high number of words using Hebrew as their reference language. “It turned out that over 80 per cent of the words were in a Hebrew dictionary, but we didn’t know if they made sense together,” said Professor Kondrak. While they noted that none of their results, using any reference language, resulted in text they could describe as “correct”, the Hebrew output was most successful. However, following tweaks to the spelling, the scientists used Google Translate to convert it into English, which read: “She made recommendations to the priest, man of the house and me and people.” “It’s a kind of strange sentence to start a manuscript but it definitely makes sense,” said Professor Kondrak.