Editing Cracking the Voynich code 2014 (section)

==Specific tasks==
* '''Phase 1:''' Characterize the text. Write scripts that count its features. How many words? How long is the alphabet? Word frequencies? Probability of one letter following another. Probability of two letter pairs (2-grams) and n-letter group (n-grams).  Compare these in a table with known languages obtained by running your same code on the Declaration of Human Rights.  Don't forget to get a short paragraph of English and manually count everything and then run it on your code to cross check it is counting correctly.  You must always validate your code or you will lose marks.

* '''Phase 2:''' Write a general descriptor for each picture in the book, eg. water, woman, tree, flower, vegetable, leaf, dancing etc. Associate each descriptor with the appropriate paper. Write some code to find which words on a page are unique to those pages with those descriptors.  Which words also suddenly increase in frequency on those pages with shared descriptors? Tabulate the results.

* '''Phase 3:''' Investigate the use of Word Recurrence Interval (WRI) versus rank plots.  Plot WRI curves of the Voynich versus other languages from the Declaration of Human Rights.

* '''Phase 4:''' Think up some of your own ideas to try out.

* '''Phase 5:''' As WRI is a language-independent metric, you can select classification features based on WRI. Then you can run an SVM and an MDA classifier to compare the Voynich against other languages in the Declaration of Human Rights. Then you can run it against the works of specific authors of interest such as Roger Bacon, John Dee, and Edward Kelley.