Unlocking the Voynich Cipher via the New Algorithmic Coding Hypothesis

Abstract

The Voynich Manuscript (VM) remains one of history's most perplexing cryptographic and linguistic puzzles (Landini & Foti, 2020). This paper introduces a novel hypothesis: that the VM's text is not a direct encoding of a natural language but represents a compressed data stream utilizing principles analogous to modern LZ77 compression and Huffman coding (Huffman, 1952; Ziv & Lempel, 1977). We propose that the manuscript's unusual statistical properties, including its low redundancy and specific word structure, are artifacts of a sophisticated encoding process rather than features of an unknown language (Montemurro & Zanette, 2013; Reddy & Knight, 2011). To evaluate this, we developed a computational framework that treats VM transliterations as a encoded bitstream. This framework systematically tests decompression parameters, using Shannon entropy as a primary fitness metric to identify outputs resembling natural language (Shannon, 1948; Cover & Thomas, 2006). While a complete decipherment is not yet achieved, this methodology provides a new, rigorous, and reproducible computational approach to VM analysis, moving beyond traditional linguistic correlation (Hauer & Kondrak, 2011). The framework's architecture and initial proof-of-concept results are presented, outlining a clear pathway for future research with a fully digitized VM corpus.