The Voynich Ninja

JKP: Well, I would love someone to tell me that I have to provide you with what you want as per forum rules as it is not your forum. I am not sure that it is your place to be enforcing forum rules, if you are not happy with what I have written then you do not need to comment further.

(13-07-2020, 11:02 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.It does not seem difficult, theoretically. In actual fact, it is not easy to produce large sections of text with "the same kind of properties as Voynichese". We've discussed this quite extensively on various threads. That is why this theory needs to be backed up with examples.

Well, are you talking about producing Voynichese style text manually or by an algorithm? It seems that producing it manually would be much easier than producing it algorithmically.

It's up to you how you produce it. It probably doesn't matter whether it is done algorithmically or manually (at least I don't think so, so far). But I think you might discover that it's not as easy as it seems.


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On the other subject... I do not enforce forum rules. I am not a moderator. I do however sometimes remind people of the rules to make sure they are aware of it before someone else enforces it. I do it out of courtesy to give people a chance to self-correct.

A pattern encryption ?
That one just took me four minutes.
Here's an example:
[attachment=4547]

(13-07-2020, 11:28 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.It's up to you how you produce it. It probably doesn't matter whether it is done algorithmically or manually (at least I don't think so, so far). But I think you might discover that it's not as easy as it seems.


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On the other subject... I do not enforce forum rules. I am not a moderator. I do however sometimes remind people of the rules to make sure they are aware of it before someone else enforces it. I do it out of courtesy to give people a chance to self-correct.

As far as manually producing Voynichese goes, when you say "it is not as easy as it seems" then are you saying it is difficult, but very possible or incredibly difficult, in your opinion. I can accept that it is probably not easy until one gets into the habit of producing such text, but once one has a habit for it my suspicion is that it is not very difficult.

Mark, "your suspicion that it is not very difficult" is purely theoretical and subjective if you do not show examples.

Those of us who have attempted to reproduce text with Voynich-like qualities (this has been discussed in several threads) have not found it easy.

(14-07-2020, 04:07 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Mark, "your suspicion that it is not very difficult" is purely theoretical and subjective if you do not show examples.

Those of us who have attempted to reproduce text with Voynich-like qualities (this has been discussed in several threads) have not found it easy.

So are you saying that in your opinion nobody has yet manually or otherwise produced text with Voynich-like qualities or are you saying that you think such text has been produced, but it was not that easy to do so?

Obviously, I should say that the only text which will perfectly have Voynich-like properties is text from the manuscript itself. Likewise, obviously, text which is a perfect copy of text from the Voynich could merely have been copied and therefore could not have been generated text.

Mark, if you could produce text with Voynichese properties (without copying or looking at Voynichese itself while you are doing it), then it means you have a strong understanding of its structure and would potentially be able to describe it.

That, in itself, would be an achievement because being able to describe it can help to differentiate between linguistic, conlang, or other patterns.


Taking whole tokens and repeating them would not accomplish this goal because it does not differentiate between meaningful or meaningless text. It would have to be individual glyphs or components that come together to form the same structure. This is essentially what Stolfi, Rugg, and Timm & Schinner, and others have been working on, but from significantly different perspectives and with different degrees of success (Rugg was not very successful, his results do not come out like Voynichese).

Quote:So are you saying that in your opinion nobody has yet manually or otherwise produced text with Voynich-like qualities or are you saying that you think such text has been produced, but it was not that easy to do so?

In the case of Hyde and Rugg, there was an attempt to prove it was a hoax because they claimed Voynichese could be reproduced with a grille based on a prefix/root/suffix model. The problem is that the text generated by their grille is not very close to Voynichese and tweaking the grille does not improve it because the underlying premise of how VMS text is constructed is wrong. So they thought they had produced Voynich-like text, but... it's not. It violates numerous discernible patterns. In other words, they tried, but did not succeed, in generating Voynich-like text.

I only read Stolfi recently. The forumites kindly provided me with a link. He made many good observations about the VMS text. His observations about the structure of Voynichese are much more in-depth and accurate than anything written by Hyde and Rugg. He really LOOKED at the structure of the text. But, in my opinion, he still hasn't got it quite right. It's a subject too long to address fully in a forum post (it requires a lot of examples), but I don't think the underlying basis of Voynichese completely fits within the core-mantle-crust system.

Timm and Schinner have been working on describing and reproducing Voynich text for years and have published numerous articles that you can find through links on this forum and through web search. They have described patterns of self-similarity from a different perspective from previous researchers, a dynamic that is often overlooked. If you have any questions, you can ask Torsten Timm. He participates on this forum.

Also, as I mentioned, there are some forum threads discussing this, including one which was a challenge to produce Voynichese-like text based on natural language.

MarcoP proposed an exercise of simply producing several pages of meaningless text and numerous researchers reported that they found this quite difficult (I also found it difficult). When trying to produce meaningless text it is very difficult to make it resemble language (which the VMS does, otherwise there would not be so many people proposing substitution ciphers), and also difficult not to quickly start repeating yourself (which the VMS APPEARS to do but which, when studied, turns out to be quite deceptive).


In a nutshell, serious researchers have been working on the problem of creating convincing Voynichese-like text for quite a number of years by whatever means might be possible (algorithmically, systematically, or manually). Whether it's "filler" or meaningful, it's not something that is "relatively easy to produce" as you suggested in previous posts.

I know Torsten has his App to simulate the autocopy model but I wonder if anybody has taken it further or worked independently to produce a Voynich simulator?

It would be interesting to see how many rules were needed to produce something that would pass an expert eye.

(15-07-2020, 12:08 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Mark, if you could produce text with Voynichese properties (without copying or looking at Voynichese itself while you are doing it), then it means you have a strong understanding of its structure and would potentially be able to describe it.

That, in itself, would be an achievement because being able to describe it can help to differentiate between linguistic, conlang, or other patterns.

Why can't I copy portions, if I wish, and why can't I look at Voynichese itself while I am doing it?

Obviously if I make a perfect copy that is of little interest, but it should be perfectly OK for me to copy bits and paste them together if and when I wish.

Again it seems unnecessary to prevent someone from looking at Voynichese as and when they produce their Voynichese like text.

These restrictions would certainly make things harder, but it seems to me to be completely unnecessary. The author of the Voynich could copy portions if he/she wished. The author of the Voynich could look at the rest of what he/she had already written. Why impose restrictions that did not apply to the author?

It is a mistake to think that being able to produce Voynichese text necessarily would mean that you have a strong understanding of its structure and would be able to describe it. I can walk, but I can't describe very precisely what I am doing. There are lots of things that we can do that we can't describe as to what we are doing. So whilst making up text manually requires some conscious consideration, it doesn't necessarily make the process very easy to turn into an algorithm.

I think you may be getting ahead of yourself with what you interpret as to what one could necessarily conclude from being able to reproduce Voynichese text.

I think it is important to distinguish between manually produced text and automatically produced text such as Rugg and others have done.