The Voynich Ninja

(07-09-2020, 04:43 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I wonder how a mirror could change the statistical issues we face though

Roughly the same way as a carnival mirror changes your constitution. Ein Ding im Spiegel, eh?

I'll put it another way. If we need an optical device to read it, they probably used a similar device to write it down, right? What kind of optical device will remove entropy when encoding and add the entropy back in when decoding? 

I guess one solution could be that you only mirror certain parts, like the tops of gallows. But this would be the same as reading it like a cipher with lots of nulls.

When I was playing with this, one of the things I did was to rotate and then partially overlay some of the letters. This created different shapes and sometimes filled in a space between letters.

Now, admittedly, I was using Photoshop and some things are easier to do with Photoshop than to do manually. But I think there is more that is possible than just mirroring.

I get that, for example if you were to offset the mirrored image by one letter, entropy would skyrocket. But how would the encoding process have worked then to obtain Voynichese?

Taking a portion of a letter and splitting it into two, and taking others and combining them into one would be one way, without having to resort to mirrors.

For example... look at the shape of q compared to the up-shifted shape of the left side of t. You can't see it with this font, but you can see it in the original text.

(08-09-2020, 12:41 AM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I'll put it another way. If we need an optical device to read it, they probably used a similar device to write it down, right? What kind of optical device will remove entropy when encoding and add the entropy back in when decoding? 

Entropy is not something like a hat which can be removed and added back, it's a calculation over a text. If the text is changed by a certain procedure, entropy will change. As to the exact procedure, if it were known, we would have already been congratulating the authors with their huge success.

Out of my head, two mirrors kept at an angle allow for quick shuffling of letters in a sentence. Place two mirrors kept at an angle above a line of text, and you will see.

Maybe one should look at the VMS through a ( extremly distorting ) Beryl. In the Middle Ages the first Spectacles and magnifying glasses were made from this (from 1350 on). Unfortunately, the distortion of each beryl is naturally unique.

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