The Voynich Ninja

(11-01-2022, 12:48 AM)pfeaster Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Neat!  So if I'm understanding this correctly, if we were to think of this as a game like checkers, you'd read any Latin letters on the squares the gamepiece jumped over each time to get to its new position?

Yes, but not in diagonal, rather like a rook (chess): all you need to record a move is one coordinate (glyph) when alternating vertical and horizontal moves. There is also a wrap-around possibility to go to a coordinate using the shortest path (through the border). There are many possibilities for special rules. For example, I thought large spaces between vords could be meaningful (a double space, to switch x/y) now I am investigation k/t gallows: they could act as disambiguation markers between the x/y-symmetrical vord-paths instead of coordinates.

Starting and ending a line at the (space, space) coordinates (any corner) is different than moving to the border between vords, so there is a LAAFU effect. 

Trigrams (xyx or yxy) of the ciphertext define a horizontal or vertical segment of the path between two positions of a token. I realized then that the "clock" on the Rosettes page describes the basic building blocks of the cipher: horizontal and vertical segments between positions of a token (represented by a small circle). All the triple lines surrounding this diagram and elsewhere could symbolize the stream of meaningful text contained in some trigrams (not all trigrams, because the board is mostly empty).

This is the delusion that I've been enjoying since 2017.

Quote:I could see a nice competitive game arising out of this, where players would draw cards with words from a deck and compete to see who could encipher their word in the fewest moves.  If you design it, maybe we can set up an online tournament.

I'm not sure cards would make the game more interesting. There could be a "build the cipher as you go" element to the game: you're allowed to add a letter on the board on an unused spot (a reason to stay on the beaten path as much as possible, to preserve space for later when you really need it), making it permanent if you win a round... something like that, I haven't really thought about the design of a game for two people or more.

Quote:This kind of cipher is great fun to try to design in general, and there seem to be a vast number of possibilities, all of which have the added advantage of seeming rather hard to crack -- not because they're particularly sophisticated compared to better-known cipher strategies, but only because they use an unexpected logic.

I would like to have rules that cause changes in statistics: variable forbidden positions or "one way" markers or walls on the board.

Quote:But whenever I pick up a history or survey of cipher techniques, it never seems to mention anything like this.  Does anyone have an explanation as to why?  I assume it must be for some reason other than that the Illuminati use it and have therefore suppressed all references to it.  (One explanation could of course be that I'm just not reading the right stuff.)

Nothing is known apparently. However they did play board games so the possibility existed that someone, just once, designed a cipher with rules similar to a board game, it isn't a big conceptual leap.

(11-01-2022, 10:37 AM)nablator Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I'm not sure cards would make the game more interesting. 

I was just thinking there would need to be some way to assign players a specific text to encipher -- I don't see cards in particular as having any other advantage.

(11-01-2022, 10:37 AM)nablator Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Quote:But whenever I pick up a history or survey of cipher techniques, it never seems to mention anything like this.  Does anyone have an explanation as to why?  ...

Nothing is known apparently. However they did play board games so the possibility existed that someone, just once, designed a cipher with rules similar to a board game, it isn't a big conceptual leap.

No, it's not.  And closely related to the gameboard is the counting-board used for mathematical calculations, which is another model I find intriguing, in part because it's something that was ubiquitous at the time but easy to overlook now.  There was, as I'm sure many here know, a gradual transition in the late medieval and early modern periods from working out problems with tokens on ruled boards (the old way) to working out problems on paper with Arabic numerals (the new way).  If later ciphers were designed to be solved "on paper," then, there's arguably some context for imagining an earlier period in which the cultural impulse could have been to design them to be solved by manipulating objects on boards instead.  There's also some context for imagining the latter approach falling into disfavor as philosophically "behind the times."

Coming at this from another direction:

I gather that at least a few of us have been drawn to gameboard-type ciphers in our efforts to come up with plausible explanations for the structure of Voynichese.  But ciphers like these also seem to have much to recommend them more generally: a method that would be fiendishly difficult to implement otherwise can become trivially easy when worked by (say) moving a few coins around a grid.

If we can think of ciphers like this, presumably other people can too: as you say, it doesn't take any big conceptual leap.  And yet it's not only the early 1400s for which documentation of such methods seems to be lacking.  I don't find anything comparable mentioned in popular-audience survey works like Helen Gaines's You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. either.  It's not that gameboards aren't sometimes associated with ciphers, but when they are, they don't seem to be used mechanically *as* gameboards (e.g., the "chessboard/trellis" and "straddling checkerboard" ciphers).

So I'm unsure how to reconcile our sense that this approach shouldn't have taken a "big conceptual leap" in the early 1400s with the observation that it seems to have had so little impact on cryptological practices in general, even up to our own time.  Is there some factor that militates against the development of this kind of cipher process?

It really does appear to have its advantages.  Processes such as Anton's spatial spread of characters in different pools (especially if used in combination with a Polybius Square) might seem prohibitively cumbersome for a text as long as the VM is if we think about someone carrying out the encryption and decryption in their heads or straightforwardly on paper.  But the use of physical tokens might have streamlined such work in ways that are hard to appreciate without actual experience of doing it.  J. M. Pullan writes in The History of the Abacus (1969) about the processes used for reckoning on counting-boards:

Quote:These methods may look clumsy and slow to those of us who have become accustomed to Arabic figures and are proficient in using them for calculation, but when we consider that counter-casting was the normal method for dealing with accounts and calculations of all kinds for several hundred years it is evident that it must have been regarded as reliable and efficient.  
A little practice with counters on a simple board will show that this is indeed true; and anyone who will take the trouble to work a few simple calculations may be surprised at the ease with which they can be carried out once he has become familiar with the feel of the counters....
Actual practice with counters is necessary, too, for a full appreciation of the size, shape and layout of a counting-board and of the reasons for the kind of moves that are made, including a number of short cuts that one soon begins to use.  It is only by practice with counters that one realises why one should always push them from place to place and not attempt to pick them up; and one soon finds by experience what an advantage it is to have a low rim round the board.
When explaining the moves required for even a simple calculation detailed verbal or written descriptions tend, inevitably, to make the procedure seem longer and more complicated than it is in practice, and this is another reason why one should not rely upon merely reading about the abacus method, but should try it out for oneself. 

The same could go for seemingly "unwieldy" cipher methods.  It's worth bearing in mind that the people of the early 1400s had more powerful tools available to them for manipulating data than we might assume.  The publication below dates from 1542, but the methods being described were very old by then.

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(11-01-2022, 05:24 PM)pfeaster Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.So I'm unsure how to reconcile our sense that this approach shouldn't have taken a "big conceptual leap" in the early 1400s with the observation that it seems to have had so little impact on cryptological practices in general, even up to our own time.  Is there some factor that militates against the development of this kind of cipher process?

The military and diplomats had no interest in making the enciphering process creative and fun. Like JKP, I believe that a family project is more likely than other possibilities, the secret was kept in a family and was never known to scholars who wrote books about the history of cryptography.

Do you know this game?

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