24-04-2022, 01:36 AM
24-04-2022, 01:36 AM
24-04-2022, 10:30 AM
11-05-2022, 06:40 PM
(23-04-2022, 04:20 PM)RenegadeHealer Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.(22-04-2022, 07:34 PM)MichelleL11 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I support anyone who is interested in "solving" the text to perform the basic frequency analyses like Searcher. Nothing is more convincing than looking at the numbers yourself and realizing the issues that are being faced in getting Voynichese (at the glyph level) to look and act like natural language.
Maybe this explanation will help for understanding the issue better…
Great write up, Michelle. This is, as we’d put it over on Reddit, a good ELI5 (“Explain Like I’m Five”). The thing is, to anybody motivated and intelligent enough to dive into cryptography or linguistics to explore a mystery, the statistical analyses that rule out Voynichese being either a natural human language plaintext or a simple substitution cipher are not rocket science. They can be dry and disappointing, but not nearly as much of a letdown as spending huge amounts of time and energy pursuing a possible solution that was doomed from the start.
I also like how diplomatic your explanation is, which is something I’ve said to/about Koen as well. What you’ve described here is nothing that Nick P, Marco P, and Rene Z haven’t been explaining to noobs for years. All three of these luminaries, however, are wont to express it in a way that hints at a weariness of having to explain it anew so many times, and a frustration that it isn’t more obvious or more common knowledge by now. And after having put so much time and labor into discovering these properties of Voynichese, I get it. But this can be a bit offputting to those minority of starry-eyed noobs who are willing to do their homework. (But just need to know where to start.)
Hi @renegadehealer,
I don't object to your assessment at all, except that Marco should not be in this shortlist (his patience is exemplary).
What can I say, what can I do?
I have a large web site, but when the case is clear that a poster has not read it sufficiently, should I just repeat the information in forum posts here? I don't think so.
The latest posts in Ahmet Ardic's thread clearly show that after several decades, people still don't understand the purpose of transliteration alphabets. And this is not just happening now. This has been happening all the time, throughout all these decades.
This doesn't make me frustrated. It makes me write less and less here.
However, at the same time I applaud all the information and help, presented here by others, specifically in this case Michelle, but also Anton has put in a good effort relate to entropy. (Not sure how much it has been read and understood
)Now the worst thing about Voynich posts in my opinion is when they are all about people, and not about the manuscript. So far, I have just been writing about people, so my bad.
What I want to add (and yes, this is somewhere on my web site), is that the unusual bigram entropy is just a single number summarising a 2x2 frequency distribution of character bigrams.
In order to match the Voynich text to some plain text, it is not AT ALL sufficient to achieve the same bigram entropy. The entire distribution should be matched, to some reasonable level.
There is an infinite number of distributions that lead to the same entropy.
Here ends the constructive part.
This post does not help the people who already understood it, because they already understood it.
It is also unlikely to help anyone who had not understood this, because they don't care, and if they cared they could have read it at my web site.
If I sound frustrated, please don't worry. I am just being realistic. There are so many interesting things happening, but this is a bit outside the various fora.
11-05-2022, 07:19 PM