![[0500] The Book Of Woo](/comics/2013-07-29-0500-the-book-of-woo.jpg "[0500] The Book Of Woo")
Have you ever heard of the Voynich manuscript? It’s a mysterious book, possibly created in the early 15th century, that contains weird illustrations and text written in an unknown script and language. Since its rediscovery in 1912 by Wilfrid Voynich, it has eluded the decipherment attempts of generations of cryptographers. The Voynich manuscript is a fascinating piece of history that has inspired many novels, games and films. Amateur cryptographers can find the latest news and research on the Voynich manuscript and other uncracked ciphers on Nick Pelling’s blog Cipher Mysteries. He’s also the author of the readable non-fiction book The Curse of the Voynich.
To celebrate the publication of the 500th Sandra and Woo strip, I have decided to publish “my own Voynich manuscript”. So here it is, The Book of Woo! As you can see, it resembles the Voynich manuscript in several ways. But of course we couldn’t create 240 pages, 4 had to be enough. Unlike the Voynich manuscript, The Book of Woo definitely contains sensible information that can be deciphered. I guarantee it ;-). And I will pay the person who is able to provide a decipherment that’s sufficiently close to the plain text a reward of $500. Send your decipherment attempt(s) to novil@gmx.de. I would also love to hear about your general ideas or statistical analyses that you carried out. There is no deadline. I will not publish the solution until at least strip #1000.
But be warned: It’s a huge challenge and I don’t expect to receive a valid decipherment at all. It’s primarily a work of art, not a puzzle for the general public. I believe that only experienced and dedicated code breakers have the chance to succeed. A lot of time was spent on the encryption. If you think you can simply carry out a frequency analysis on the letters and be able to reconstruct the English or German plain text this way, well, that’s just a waste of time. However, to make things a little easier, I want to give you the following hints:
- The encryption isn’t based on an algorithm only suitable for computers which executes a loop 100 times or something like that.
- The encryption isn’t based on some sort of device or mechanism that is hard to get.
- No “classical” steganographic method was used since that would just be impossibly hard to crack.
- The plain text is some sort of literature, as one can guess from Woo’s comment and the illustrations. A lot of time went into the plain text as well, it’s not just a copy of the first page of Rascal or something like that.
You can download larger versions of the four pages of the Book of Woo here:
[Update: 10 August 2013] Everybody who is seriously interested in deciphering The Book of Woo should read the comment section. There is a lot of interesting information in it.
[Update: 31 March 2015] The Book of Woo Wiki, now maintained by our reader Chris, also contains valuabable information for anyone who’s trying to break the code. In case the wiki should go offline sometime in the future, I created a complete backup of the wiki’s content on 31 March 2015.
In other news, the winners of the Sandra and Woo and Gaia fanart contest 2013 have been posted.
Thanks to everyone who participated!
- Sandra: Hey, Woo, what are you writing?
- Woo: Oh, just a little story.
- Sandra: Really? Can I have a look?
- Woo: Sure, I’ve just finished it.
- Sandra: What in Voynich’s name…?!
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@ Ryan:
So, there are 30 chatacters in the German language (if you count letters with umlauts). I think one of the characters in this story is a name. So, this story definitely uses German
Is it possible that one of the characters is a red herring? Something created to throw everyone off the real answer?
Im not sure if this is already stated, but is it possible that the pages are out of order and thus the story should be sought to be understood differantly? the page in sandras left hand could be the last but displayed first in the comic or maybe there are more that are out of order? sorry if i’m being redundant.
So I was looking through the wiki briefly and not sure where to comment on this so i came back here. I think the oPo (o loop o) symbol actually is the word for paw because in my opinion it roughly resembles a paw print and it occurs a lot on page 2 where the paw appears a lot. This kind of thing seems similar to how glyphs or Chinese characters originated with the shape of things determining their spelling. Just a random guess though. Hope its worth looking at.
The Book of Woo Wiki, maintained by our reader Foogod, also contains valuabable information for anyone who’s trying to break the code. In case the wiki should go offline sometime in the future, I created a complete backup of the wiki’s content on 31 March 2015.
If I don’t eventually find out what this says, I will most likely kill someone before checking in to an asylum and spending the rest of my life giggling at the waltzing peccaries that visit me.
I like the Cooper Cane in the second panel, nice nod to another piece of Raccoon-centered media
@ AckAckAck:
Well that’s pretty damn impressive, especially just from looking at pretty pictures. Did you send that to Novil? Did she say if it was close?
So, according to the hint from nearly a year ago, “Potbelly Hill” (or its german equivalent) appears somewhere in the text. Furthermore, it should be “quite easy to determine which page”.
….which page is it on? The second one? All I learned about Potbelly Hill is that its some sort of ancient mountain sanctuary…
So how would you send the money if the person was in a different country? Just asking. Don’t think me cocky for asking this, this is perfectly possible.
Hello all,
I’m new to Sandra and Woo (came here via Girl Genius, IIRC), and even newer to the Book of Woo. As many of you here, I have an interest in amateur cryptanalysis but am by no means an expert. This text is like nothing I have ever seen before, though! Normally, in cryptanalysis, you spend hours looking for some sort of tell-tale repetition… this code has repetition everywhere, but none of it seems to repeat consistently. I’ve spent a week chasing patterns and ending up in dead-ends. But I’m not one to give up easily! A great big thanks to all those people who have already contributed to the story so far. I have started with the transcript that Novil himself published in the comments with three fixed errors, and the unfolding of the two character sets already done.
Is anybody else actually still actively working on cracking this?
I have a direct question for Novil if he is willing to answer it :
Is it possible to get to the solution using just the transcript, or is there some extra information that we will need to extract from the original pages in order to crack it? I don’t mean clues in the illustrations… I am thinking about information stored in, for example, relative letter sizes, variations in letter boldness, relative positions of the text on the page, something else that I haven’t thought of that can be gleaned from the original text that cannot be found in the transcript?
TIA
Are we going to get our yearly hint?
It’s too sad to have this whole story that no one can read…
Arpie wrote:
I would consider most such things as steganographic methods which I have not used.
Well, It appears that I missed the most active part of this, but I am nevertheless here now. I am afraid that at the moment I have little to bring to the table, but I will nevertheless post my main idea:
I believe that it is possible that Novil did what I will call “flanking” for ease of reference. Flanking is when in the encrypted text, identical phrases or letters appear on either side of a letter, for example, DOD (I will be using FooGod’s transcription). Now some of these flanked phrases may either refer to a different letter or pair of letters. This technique could be useful for Novil to use, due to its ability to have a hay day with frequency analysis. The downsides, for us, if this was used is that not all of these flankings could actually represent a single letter, an example being dpd, which is occasionally at the end of a sentence.
@Arpie
I just started, and if there are enough people for active analysis, I plan to begin working on it.
Additionally, what page is Potbelly hill on?
@ Mystik:
Potbelly Hill is an archaeological site in Turkey (called Göbekli Tepe there). As the user Rilota Ta stated in the bookofwoo wiki it is most likely referred to on page 3, as 10.000 BC is the approximate age of the site and the scorpion figure on top of the box is very similar to the one on stone pillar #43 there. https://aintnohothouseflower.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/254952-a.jpg
Hey, I discovered the comic yesterday and decided I’d try my hand at this.
Does the book of woo follow English syntax?
Or better yet, does it switch between English and German? I looked it up to see if anyone had done a transliteration already and noticed the frequent change from lower to upper case. This could possibly mean that there’s some sort of symbol that signifies a switch so you could easily reference your own coded document, which means you probably have some signal to desperate different switches from one another.
E.g. YOU COULD BE USING CONJUNCTIONS, but i am unsure.
OOOHHHHH!!!
It seems to switch between English (upper case) and Germanic (lower case) everytime there’s a suffix! W signifies when there is a prefix or suffix!
Regardless, we are still stuck without the second encryption having been cracked since Potbelly Hill does not show up. I’ll be getting back into this in November, once I haveore free tume. Thanks narga
Okay, maybe this has already been remarked upon, and if so I apologize, but If we assume that both English and German were used and if we assume that any given dual-language-word (i.e. The+Das) will thus occur as two tokens (one for each language), then the passage appears to follow Zipf’s law.
Below uses the nneonneo transcription method and the assumption that ‘ = word delimiter:
The combined total of ta/sa is about 97 occurrences, 1st place on list (L) x occurrences(O) = 97
o / rilota L x O = 101
wele/de LxO = 132 (okay, that’s an outlier)
te L x O = 80
ruta / tin L x O = 180 …
Okay, it’s not following very closely. There’s got to be another factor that would make it follow Zipf’s Law.
If it did follow Zipf, we could guess at the word assignments like this:
ta 52 The / Das / Der
sa 45 The / Das / Der
o 26 Of
rilota 25 Of
wele 22 And
de 22 And
te 20 To
ruta 15 A
tin 15 A
wonsi 14 In
da 14 In
dota 13 Is
rola 11 Is
ine 11 I
sadoce 10 I
rine 10 That
cen 10 That
duwo 9 It
eto 9 It
ete 9 For
on 9 For
gede 8 you
& 8 you
na 7 was
tuge 6 was
And below that the distinction is too slim to even guess.
So the next step would be to plug these possible matches into the text and look for context.
“Woo” also means trash science, pseudo science… all that nonsense. Calling it the Book of Woo is kinda hilarious.
breaking th code of woo … vs world of coxe crackers … this is gonna be fun game to watch
I’m not sure if someone else still trying to decode this, but anyway. I have two mad theories about the book. They mostly fit into hints, but don’t make it any easier to decypher anything, at least for me.
First one is that the glyphs don’t actually decodes into the plain text directly, but rather into a G-code for some simple drawing device, like graph paper and pencil. And the pictures tells the story, that could be translated into english, german, burmese, russian or whatever.
Second theory is that The Book of Woo is 503 pages long, and the pages 500-503 are basically filled with an indexes for the contents of the pages 1-499. For example, “Potbelly Hill” appears coded as “Strip #26 panel 3; Strip #13 panel 3”.
Just to confirm I’m understanding this correctly, does this mean that if the solution is found before #1000 it won’t be published until then, but after that point it will be only published once somebody solves it? If so, will we at least be informed that the solution has been found before #1000, even if we aren’t told what said solution is?
Been marathoning through this comic the last few days and this puzzle has my interest, but I’m not sure I’ve got much chance of solving it if people with far greater cryptographic knowledge are still looking XD Then again, maybe going into it blind will allow me to spot things others haven’t.
If I were to guess then this might have little to do with either Latin or Germanic based languages if this is a reference to the voynich manuscript. If so then Novil knows more than 2 languages. If this is true then I will assume a Slavic language as the third piece.
I don’t care for the money. I just want to read the translation. My biggest weakness is curiosity. Normally I keep researching until I have answers, this is something way out of my league. I can barely pass regular English.
Hello !
I have not seen the time pass, your riddle was published four years ago . Who is ultimately the winner? Have you ever published the decoded text?
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Holy crap it’s been years… it’s still not cracked?
@ OrphanDidgeridoo:
4 years later…
I’m looking at this and it looks devilish. I am taken over by curiosity but am not a great cryptographer. I’m going to run this one by my dad and see what he thinks… he is like really brilliant, even if he doesn’t come up with anything it will be fun to watch
I just read through this…luckily we still have a bit of time before comic 1000, assuming they haven’t posted a solution yet. Also, on the second page of the Book of Woo, does it seem like the goddess is bringing fire to the raccoons like that giant in Greek mythology?
Dear all,
I have set up a copy of the old (now inaccessible) Book of Woo Wikipage here (from the backup that novil took): bookofwoo.globetagging.com
It holds plenty of information and findings about the Book of Woo and gives you the opportunity to share your theories with us all.
If you want to contact me directly, you can find my contact information there, too.
No matter if you were contributing already on the old wiki or are completely new to the Book of Woo, I hope to see you there soon! – Narga