The Voynich Ninja

(23-07-2021, 06:31 PM)byatan Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(21-07-2021, 09:51 PM)nablator Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Is that what deterministic means: only one cipher text is possible?

For this it means a given plaintext will always produce the same ciphertext.

Of course, this does not imply that the cipher is reversible. For instance:

A -> Ti
B -> T
C -> i
D -> ii

Both AC and BD are ciphered as Tii. The cipher is deterministic but not reversible.

(24-07-2021, 09:41 AM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Of course, this does not imply that the cipher is reversible. For instance:

A -> Ti
B -> T
C -> i
D -> ii

Both AC and BD are ciphered as Tii. The cipher is deterministic but not reversible.

This is a good observation in the event that 'Tii' is your only ciphertext and you make certain assumptions about the format. In any case, don't worry, mine is reversible.

Two ideas about this ciphertext:
1. i is just a modifier for previous symbol, so for example word "Kieiiea" is split into symbols as (Ki)(eii)(e)(a). Note that i is never first letter.
2. Real word bounds are not spaces, but upper case letters. Since only two uppercase letters (T and K) are followed by another uppercase letter they then must be "a" and "i"

(24-07-2021, 09:41 AM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(23-07-2021, 06:31 PM)byatan Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(21-07-2021, 09:51 PM)nablator Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Is that what deterministic means: only one cipher text is possible?

For this it means a given plaintext will always produce the same ciphertext.

Of course, this does not imply that the cipher is reversible. For instance:

A -> Ti
B -> T
C -> i
D -> ii

Both AC and BD are ciphered as Tii. The cipher is deterministic but not reversible.

This is a particular sticky problem as in some cases it seems certain that an [i] must be part of a first segment, and on others that [i] must be part of the second segment. I guess byatan's answer means that the solution should be relative straightforward.

Can I ask you, do the capital letters stand alone of the cursive bigrams or trigrams?

Could they be a kind of reference points for the subsequent italic text (in the form of bigrams or trigrams), while at the same time being a 1: 1 replacement for a letter of the alphabet?

I have an idea, but I need a couple of days to try it.

Trust me Marco, your model and explanation were anything but sloppy! And of course it remains to be seen if the requirements I made up are even a step in the right direction for reverse-engineering the VMs text. It may indeed be a ciphertext whose plaintext is not recoverable. I wonder if there are any ways this could be reliably distinguished from stochastically-generated strings of glyphs that never had any communicative or information-storing intent in the first place; I lean towards no.

I somehow managed to completely miss René's paper from this last spring, even though it's right up my alley. Thank you for that satisfying read. What René describes is indeed exactly what I'm thinking about, but more developed. That man is an absolute legend. To be honest I'm really not sure which one researcher had the biggest influence on my volvelle idea, but from now on I'll be citing Zandbergen, 2021 for it.

I especially like his easygoing and proactive approach to the hard problems of the Voynich text (Currier languages, LAAFU, frequent exact reduplication, frequent quasi-reduplication, infrequent multi-word strings, Grove words, small Levenshtein edit distance, one-legged gallows, m, labelese, and most of all binomial vord length distribution). For all of these except one-legged gallows, he expresses at least some confidence, that a model like his is tweakable in ways that could produce all of these effects.

I agree with Marco and René that frequent reduplication and one-legged gallows, respectively, are the hardest problems of the Voynich text. They stand out in how few satisfying explanations that involve a meaningful text they have generated. I've been doing some thinking about the one-legged gallows recently. I'm feeling hopeful about two potential explanations in particular for their strong preference for top lines:

1. [f] and [p] are ligatures, most likely of [ke] and [te] respectively. Either they proved too cumbersome to write without bumping into the line above, and/or their use is a deliberate indicator of the first line of a new paragraph. (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.)
   
2. [f] and [p] are used to encode a type of information that, due to deliberate stylistic and content formatting choices, is confined mostly to paragraph titles and labels. By way of analogy, consider the rare Greek letter sampi. It's almost wholly obsolete, except for its use in the native Greek numeral system, where it represents 900. Suppose a Greek legal text, which uses Greek numerals to index laws, were to be the sole surviving specimen of the Greek language centuries after the apocalypse. Decoders would be puzzled by the fact that the letter sampi only seems to occur in titles and top lines of paragraphs.
   

As for reduplication, that one still spooks me. What I've been trying to ask myself is, In what kind of recorded information, at what level of detail, is reduplication and near reduplication to be expected to this degree? I'm struck that if each vord encoded a single Roman letter of a text in a language that features doubled letters, one might expect to find the same vord twice in a row fairly often. But this possibility creates more problems than it solves, so I don't take it seriously, and proffer it here only as an example of what I mean.

I’m not able to explain why the writer wasn’t forced to have a very regular cipher which machines generate. But all I will say here are the past results, that can create sentence and the rest of main story.

(25-07-2021, 05:59 PM)Searcher Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I have an idea, but I need a couple of days to try it.

Actually, I still have an idea, but still don't have a solution. Unfortunately, I didn't have too much time to figure out it, and the monitor of my notebook doesn't work, so I did some observations, when I only could do at least something. I suspect that I'll be busy all the nearest time, therefore I'll share my drafts in that state as it is.
I think all the enciphered text is divided in blocks which are indicated with a capital letter (F, K, T, E, Y), possibly, those blocks (or groups) differ by their values, for example, the same bigrams have different values (meanings) in different groups, maybe, only some of them. 
Look the hidden text. I marked all the groups with different colors.
I have a few notes.
Possibly, the text need to be read without capital letters, if those letters are only indicators (tags) of blocks. In this case, it will look like this:
Possibly, words like FaiT or TaaT are some code words in tags in the form of letters.
E and Y group confuses me because of their short lenth, perhaps they duplicate some of the rest groups.
I found strings of the text that are repeated almost exactly, but with a little difference:
1)
[font=Times New Roman][font=Times New Roman]Tiooiea             bar nmaei Tmz[/font][/font]
[font=Times New Roman][font=Times New Roman][font=Times New Roman]qooiea Tiaeean bar nmaei Teib Tiiiiz[/font][/font][/font]
Fooiea Tiaeean bar nmaei Teib miiiz
or
 iooiea             bar nmaei  mz
qooiea iaeean  bar nmaei  eib  iiiiz
  ooiea iaeean  bar nmaei  eib  iiiz
2)
[font=Times New Roman][font=Times New Roman]Fir Tian Fooyun Fiiiyun [/font][/font]
[font=Times New Roman]fiiir Tian Fooyun Fiiiyun[/font]
or
ir   ian   ooyun   iiiyun   
fiiir  ian  ooyun   iiiyun