Failed Approaches Catalogue
20 documented decipherment attempts spanning 1921-2025. Brain-V ingests these as eliminated hypotheses to avoid wasting cycles rediscovering known failures.
The manuscript was written by Roger Bacon using a microscopic shorthand cipher embedded in pen strokes, encoding descriptions of cells under a microscope and the Andromeda nebula
The manuscript uses a simple substitution cipher encoding abbreviated medieval Latin
The manuscript was authored by Anthony Ascham (16th-century English physician) using a double arithmetic progression polyalphabetic cipher encoding English text
Attempted systematic cryptanalysis with the most sophisticated military techniques of the era. Friedman hypothesized the text was a constructed/synthetic universal language, not a cipher of a natural language.
Systematic analytical effort using Cold War-era cryptanalytic techniques. No specific decipherment claim — produced statistical analysis.
The manuscript used multiple simple substitution ciphers (different keys on different pages) encoding Latin and/or early Italian. Claimed to have partially decoded plant names.
The manuscript was written in Ukrainian without vowels, containing letters about the fall of a Ukrainian kingdom
The manuscript was a Cathar liturgical manual for the Endura ritual of assisted suicide, written in a creole of Flemish, Old French, and Old High German
The text could encode a Malay or Southeast Asian language, based on word structure similarities to Austronesian languages with prefixing and suffixing morphology
The text encodes Hebrew using a substitution system
The manuscript is a hoax. Text with Voynich-like statistical properties could be generated using a Cardan grille over a table of syllables. Proposed Edward Kelley as the hoaxer.
The manuscript was created in early 15th-century northern Italy, possibly by Antonio Averlino (Filarete), using a verbose/compressed cipher technique
Statistical analysis showing the text was generated by a stochastic random process, supporting the hoax hypothesis
The manuscript was written by young Leonardo da Vinci using a simple substitution cipher with mirror writing, encoding Italian text
The plants depict New World (Mesoamerican) species and the text is written in Nahuatl (Aztec language). Claimed to identify 37 plants as species from Mexico.
Using botanical anchoring (identifying plants, then mapping their names to glyph sequences), identified approximately 14 characters and two words. Proposed a natural language encoding.
The text was generated by self-citation: the scribe copied and modified words from elsewhere in the manuscript while writing, producing structured but meaningless text
The manuscript is written in phonetic Old Turkic, containing medical and botanical content
The manuscript is written in 'proto-Romance' — a proposed now-extinct spoken precursor to modern Romance languages. No cipher involved. Content is a reference compendium for a Dominican nun about women's health.
Proposed decipherment using a cipher system called the Naibbe cipher, with supplementary materials published alongside a peer-reviewed paper