Aga: it's different for the marginalia, the images and the main text. Each have their own difficulties in figuring out whether a theory has something going for it.
I actually think proposed readings for the marginalia are incredibly difficult to prove. This is because they don't have much context. When you ask a scholar to help you to transcribe a troublesome word from a manuscript, he will also require context: at least the full paragraph, the work it is from, the language.. All these are required to assess the most likely reading of the word. In the VM, this context is limited and variable, and itself hard to decipher.
To tie this back to the thread title, luckily Voynich solutions for the main text are easy to prove by expanding them to a larger block of text in a repeatable fashion. But nobody has come close.
(14-04-2021, 09:50 PM)geoffreycaveney Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.It is not a pleasant experience to have one's mistakes caught and pointed out, but if one wants to accomplish something as difficult as deciphering the Voynich manuscript text, it is very likely going to be a necessary and unavoidable part of the process.
Oh and how, Geoffrey. Working on the VMs is an incredibly humbling undertaking. Many VMs researchers, past and present, are among the world's most cosmopolitan and well-read people, who've made professional reputations for themselves as astute problem solvers.
I'm quite certain Marco intended his criticism constructively. I know him only through his online work on the VMs, but one thing that's very clear to me about Marco is that he's a highly analytical person — my first guess for his Myers-Briggs personality type would be INTJ. People of this type like concise and precise language. They do not pull their punches when asked for feedback. They talk about facts, not feelings, and have learned to be suspicious of new people fronting a high degree of friendliness. They hold themselves and others to a high standard of performance and craftsmanship. The only way to impress these types are words and actions that make sense; They really, really do not like their time wasted. Again I do not know Marco at all outside of this community, and could be way off base with this impression of him. But his feedback to you is consistent with the feedback I've observed him give to to all purveyors of VMs-related theories. He values being fair and logical in his assessments of ideas, over making people feel good or look good. If you sense a note of unkindness in Marco's recent communications with you, I suspect he is frustrated. From his point of view, he took the time to give you honest feedback that he did not owe you, and senses that you have resisted it.
geoffreycaveney Wrote:I admit that I do see Voynich Ninja as one big brainstorming session, and I view my posts about my theories as my contributions to that brainstorming session. There is a principle that some teams of colleagues adopt in brainstorming sessions, called "Say everything".
That's fine. By the same token, any ideas you post in a forum are fair game for other participants' feedback. Know your audience. If you aren't receptive to the feedback that present company has to offer to your ideas, you may want to reconsider posting them. If you want to have complete control over the conversation about your ideas, and curate your audience, I recommend a writing them in a blog, with either no comments, or all comments approved by you.
(13-04-2021, 01:51 PM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (12-04-2021, 08:14 PM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.It would be of great interest to have a historical example of this.
I had a quick look at what Mark sent me by E-mail, but what I saw is not at all evidence of reducing entropy - quite the contrary.
That is the problem with having a quick look. I have presented you with evidence, though you seem to have omitted to respond.
(12-04-2021, 08:14 PM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (12-04-2021, 05:41 PM)Mark Knowles Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.It is perfectly possible for a cipher to decrease entropy.
It would be of great interest to have a historical example of this.
So you say and yet you have not replied to the example I gave you.
Copying from a cipher key generated from enciphered letters:
se -> XI
mi -> XIIII
qua -> XX
si -> XVIIII
su -> XXIIII
te -> LVII
to -> LXII
tu -> LXVI
toc -> LXIIII
sent -> XVIII
tuc -> LXVIII
mus -> XLVIII
tam -> LII
sen -> XIIII
is -> LIII
est -> XXIII
set -> XVII
sum -> XXVI
cum -> X
This is a word prefix, suffix and individual word mapping to a roman numeral structure. I believe that this kind of mapping can lead to reduced entropy.
I get a lot of E-mails...
I don't know how I can reasonably discuss a private E-mail based on non-disclosable images here.
What I can say is that the previous list is an extract (subset) of the nomenclator part of one diplomatic cipher.
Like all diplomatic ciphers that I have seen, this one has two properties:
1) It increases the number of different characters with respect to the plaintext
2) It will flatten the character distribution (to some extent) by allowing several encodings of the most frequent plaintext characters (vowels).
Both are contrary to what we see in the Voynich MS, as I have already said many times.
You have examples of encrypted texts using diplomatic ciphers, so it is just a matter of sitting down and doing the entropy calculation. That should be more useful than just philosophising about it.
(24-04-2021, 05:12 PM)Mark Knowles Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Generally my impression is that when people publish things on the Ninja forum they are images from documents already freely available online.
I think You are not allowed to view links.
Register or
Login to view. clears that up.
Mark, look up the rules for "fair use" for noncommercial academic citations (they differ for each country, but they are more-or-less the same for most countries).
(13-04-2021, 01:51 PM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (12-04-2021, 08:14 PM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.It would be of great interest to have a historical example of this.
I saw two answers to this.
Morse code is of course not a cipher, and modern (not historical in the sense of our problem).
I had a quick look at what Mark sent me by E-mail, but what I saw is not at all evidence of reducing entropy - quite the contrary.
The following idea is not a historical example, but it is a rather simple "joke cipher" to illustrate the concept of an entropy-reducing cipher (which in the following case will be 100% unsolvable). It seems mathematically simple enough that such a joke could have been conceived in the early 15th century:
Assign each letter its numerical value: A=1, B=2, C=3,...,Z=26.
For each letter of the original plaintext message, add 13. Then multiply this value by 2. Then subtract 2 times the original letter's numerical value. Then divide by 2, and this number is the numerical value of the ciphertext letter.
Of course, this is the equivalent of a simple kids' math puzzle book joke:
The resulting ciphertext will always be MMMMMMMMMMMMM........, no matter what the original plaintext was. Now this is obvious to any of us who have any experience or skill with ciphers and math puzzles, but the result of the "cipher rules" could easily surprise or fool people at first if they are not mathematically inclined.
Ciphers that are based on word games, word play, puns, homonyms, etc., could possibly reduce the entropy of the resulting ciphertext as well, albeit in a less extreme manner than the 100% unsolvable "cipher" above. The question is at what point they would or would not become completely unsolvable.