Rugg, Gordon

Born in Perth, Scotland; Rugg graduated in French and Linguistics, as well as a doctorate in psychology from the University of Reading, UK.

He worked as a lumberjack, field archaeologist and lecturer. He became the focus of media attention in 2004 for his work on the Voynich manuscript.

He is a co-author (along with Marian Petre) of two books for students on skills in research. Rugg is the head of the knowledge modeling team at Keele University and a visiting senior fellow at the open university.

The main theme of his research is the methods of collecting information: through receiving it from people, for purposes such as collecting requirements for software development.

His work formed one of the main directions in the Verifier method, which he developed with Joan Hyde. This is a method of critically reevaluating previous studies of complex problems. At the initial stage, a number of extraction methods are used to obtain an accurate picture of the assumptions and normal working methods used in the previous work. The next step uses knowledge of expert behavior and a series of error taxonomies to determine where human error is most likely. At the final stage, various formalisms are used to assess whether the error actually occurred. There is no guarantee that this method will catch every error - this is not a method of proving the correctness of part of the previous work, but it increases the chances of detecting key errors.

Voynich Manuscript

Rugg used an unofficial version of the Verifier method to reevaluate previous work on the Voynich manuscript , which is believed to be ciphertext based on code that has resisted decryption since the manuscript was opened by Wilfried Voynich in 1912. Previous research showed that the manuscript contained linguistic features too complex to be explained as a hoax, and too strange to be interpreted as a transliteration of an unidentified language, leaving the unencrypted cipher as the only realistic explanation.

Rugg suggested that these complexity estimates were not based on empirical data. He researched a number of methods known at the end of the sixteenth century, and found that using a modified cardan grid in conjunction with a large table of meaningless syllables, it was possible to create meaningless text that had qualitative and statistical properties similar to those of a manuscript. Rugg replicated the drawings from a series of pages in the manuscript, accompanying each of them with the same amount of text as on the original page, and found that most pages could be reproduced in one to two hours, as quickly as they could be decrypted. This indicated that a meaningless mystification manuscript, as long and apparently linguistically complex as the Voynich manuscript, could be produced, along with color illustrations, by one person from 250 to 500 hours.

However, there is debate about the features of the manuscript that Rugg's proposed method was not able to imitate. The two main features are lines showing various linguistic features of the main part of the manuscript, such as the keys of the Nile, and the statistical properties of the generated text. Rugg argues that these linguistic functions are trivially easy to fool using the same approach with a different set of tables, and that would add about five minutes to create each page; the counterargument is that it makes the hype too complicated to be believable. Regarding statistics, Rugg points out that text created from the same set of initial meaningless syllables, but using different table structures, demonstrates significantly different statistical properties. Since there are tens of thousands of table design combinations, he argues that it would be just a matter of time to find a design that would yield the same statistical properties as Voynich. Whether this might turn out to be useful or not is another problem, as it can be used to support Rugg's argument or rejected as a coincidence.

Further counterarguments:

• There is no historical evidence that the gimbal was used for this purpose at any time in history.
• Radiocarbon dating, codicology, and paleography - all this indicates that the manuscript was built about a century before gimbal lattices were developed.
• The mathematical concept of randomness has not yet been fully formed in the proposed period of time.

The argument is ongoing.

• Petra, Marian and Gordon Rugg. The unwritten rules of PhD research. McGraw-Hill International, 2010.
• Maiden, NAM, and Gordon Rugg. "ACRE: selecting methods for requirements acquisition." Software Engineering Journal 11.3 (1996): 183-192.
• Rugg Gordon, and Peter McGeorge. “The sorting techniques: a tutorial paper on card sorts, picture sorts and item sorts.” Expert Systems 14.2 (1997): 80-93.
• Rugg Gordon, “The mystery of the Voynich Manuscript: New analysis of a famously cryptic medieval document suggests that it contains nothing but gibberish.” Scientific American 291.1 (2004): 104109.

• Personal website at Keele University
• BBC Staffordshire Feature on the Voynich Manuscript
• Das Geheimnis des mysteriösen Voynich-Codes at Wissenschaft.de
• What are Neal keys at www.voynich.net