Cracking the Voynich Code 2022 weekly progress

Weekly Progress

Week 1

Reilly

• Background research into work of previous students

Greg

• Background research into academic background of the Voynich Manuscript

Week 2

Reilly

• First meeting with supervisor
• Begin planning project and first deliverable: Project Management Plan

Greg

• First meeting with supervisor
• Begin planning project and first deliverable: Project Management Plan

Week 3

Reilly

• Set up GitHub repository
• Set up Dropbox for shared documents
• Expand background and objectives sections of Project Management Plant
• Create Work Breakdown Structure

Greg

• Create Project Management Plan
• Detail project background, objectives, deliverables of plan
• Create project Gantt chart

Week 4

Reilly

• Setup Wiki
• Plan and allocate first body of work
• Start designing text formatter

Greg

• Plan and allocate first body of work

Week 5

Reilly

• Explore transcript sources and EVA character meanings
• Complete formatter design and write up GitHub readme justifying design
• Develop basic text formatter

Greg

• Learn Git and GitHub

Week 6

Reilly

• Solidify upcoming tasks

Greg

• Outline new plan for upcoming tasks
• Preliminary reading for transcription automation

Break 1

Reilly

• Started Introduction and relevant literature review and for the report
• Investigation into potential other approaches for differentating numbers and prose

Greg

• Psuedo code for HMM approach
• Implemented code to determine transition and emission probabilities
• Started write-up for relevant literature review and methodology sections

Break 2

Reilly

• Too busy with assignments so little progress was made this week

Greg

• Continued work on characteriser code
• Continued work on HMM code, currently experimenting with online libraries but can switch to a manual approach

Week 7

Reilly

• Naive anagram approach using word permutations (9+ hour runtime)
• More sensible anagram approach using character matching

Greg

• Too busy with assignments so little progress was made this week

Week 8

Reilly

• Improved anagram code by filtering duplicate entries and adding character profiling (alongside word profiling)
• Ran anagram code on common European language translations of UNDHR

Greg

• Started write up of literature review
• Continued work on HMM code, verifying parts of program to ensure correct probabilities are calculated
• Additional reading on automating transcription

Week 9

Reilly

• Ran anagram on botanical texts in multiple European languages
• Got initial promising results showing numbers as anagramming more frequently than letters
• Started writing more detail in progress report

Greg

• Completed frequency analysis and characteriser program with verification
• Written basic code for matching the features of two images
• Continued writting on the progress report
• Slightly restructred HMM design with aims to implement next week

Week 10

Reilly

• Completed Progress Report Draft

Greg

• Completed Progress Report Draft
• Restructured the planned design for automatic transcription

Week 11

Reilly

• Completed Progress Report

Greg

• Completed Progress Report