"But the people saying it was too complicated were not experts in hoaxing," Rugg says, "so I thought, that's what they are all assuming, but there is no hard evidence." Looking more closely at how this line had been examined, he discovered it had used 20th-century probability theory - "which was not invented when the manuscript was created". Linguistics experts had concluded that the possibility of its being an exotic language didn't square with the evidence, and cryptographers had been unable to identify it as a code, yet it was regarded as too complex to be a hoax. So he turned his attention to the Voynich Manuscript. "I was about to put together a bid to try this looking at causes of Alzheimer's," he adds, "and I felt it would make me more confident to try it informally first." His new technique, developed with former student Dr Joanne Hyde, is to break the deadlock in "longstanding problems where there seems to be a paradox" by considering where all the experts might have made the same assumption. Once they resort to reasoning they are not much better than mere mortals and they start to make predictable type mistakes." "Experts use huge amounts of knowledge about their particular domain but they tend not to use explicit reasoning," says Rugg.
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