The Voynich Ninja

(22-09-2023, 11:24 PM)Torsten Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.In my eyes the research method is at least as important as the research results. Starting point for my research was the idea that it is necessary to find a way to limit the amount of text to look at.

I fully agree and talking about research methods and method ideas could be an interesting topic to start.

(22-09-2023, 03:39 PM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.It is becoming more and more difficult to fully grasp all the available results and statistics, and to build onto them,

There is a highly significant thing at work there, and we don't know the explanation yet.
I see opportunities for progress exactly where there are odd statistics that lack an explanation.

Fully agree with this, too.
The question for me is, why the VMS is producing so interestingly odd results from the analysis. What is it in the book that even the most advanced cryptanalysis available and brilliant minds are not producing actionable results.
Afterall, VMS is quite a small and manageable book, simple content with sufficient data to support reliable analysis, created in a period of quite limited knowledge and experience of obfuscation and encryption - encoding.
The only hard fact about it, as far as I know, is that VMS is not written using any simple substitution methods, if the glyphs are to be considered letters.

This is just about the text analysis, if text it really is. The other side is about the images and stars. As the creator seems to have had a reason to obfuscate the information in the book, it would be quite reasonable to think that the creator of the VMS intended to obfuscate everything, even the images, pictures and stars.
Any resemblance to real world objects might just be coincidental or voluntary to deflect the real meaning, due the obfuscation process and how to read and identify to real world things, would be clear for the intended audience. I think the plants were never meant to resemble real plants, nor the constellations real constellations. They have a meaning, but the images have been obfuscated in some way to make it look-alike but just a bit. This is just my humble non expert opinion.

I see some analogy with the research for dark matter and to some extent of dark energy where we have some indirect observations of something happening.
We are able tell what it cannot be, what properties it cannot have but not much of what it might be, but some properties and laws we can show it must respect; an axion? A property of cosmos?
Our dark matter is the VMS.

(23-09-2023, 07:02 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I see opportunities for progress exactly where there are odd statistics that lack an explanation.

I see definite opportunities for progress here too -- both in trying to come up with explanations that fit the odd statistics we have and in working out methods for enhancing or expanding upon those statistics.

On one hand, it seems important for us to keep trying to formulate scenarios or hypotheses that would be consistent with all the statistical oddities we already know about, even as their number continues to increase.  Of course there are plenty of hypotheses out there that might be able to explain one or two of them.  But I don't think I've yet read any prospective explanation, no matter how fanciful or far-fetched, that would simultaneously account for the low entropy, the rigid word morphology, the "language" differences (Currier A vs. B, etc.), the preferred and dispreferred word-break combinations discovered by Emma May Smith and Marco Ponzi, the networks of similar words (including co-occurrence patterns and frequencies based on edit distance from three base forms) found by Torsten Timm, the seven "eccentric habits" described by Tavi Stafford, the patterns of "rightwardness" and "downwardness" I've worked on myself, and the existence of so-called Jackson Sequences.  And I'm sure that's an incomplete list.  A productive question to pose here, I think, is: "What's the simplest writing system we could invent ourselves that would predictably display all of these weird characteristics?"  I know that's a daunting question, but approaching it from a creative design standpoint might make it easier to answer than thinking of it only hypothetically and abstractly.

On the other hand, there are further statistics I think might be helpful but don't know how we'd go about generating.  Thanks to Smith and Ponzi, we know that there's statistically significant patterning among word-break combinations.  But what about relationships among other parts of successive words that occupy the same "slots" as each other?  Consider the sequence lokar qokar okar okol ol.  Four words in a row contain ok, three words in a row contain ar, and two words in a row contain ol in, arguably, the same morphological "slot" as ar.  How often does each of those three things occur over a sequence of adjacent words, regardless of what the words are otherwise?  How common is the generic pattern qab ab ac c, where a, b, and c represent contrastive values, regardless of what those values are?  This kind of partial repetition is probably the most intuitively conspicuous pattern there is in Voynichese, but it's frustratingly hard to study on a large scale, apart from just calculating edit distances and so on.  If we could get some really robust and flexible tools for analyzing patterns of repetition, in a way that's sensitive to morphological "slots," I suspect they'd lead to some illuminating discoveries.

(23-09-2023, 06:00 AM)Mark Knowles Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I question whether "they form a representative subset for the word types". By selecting only those occurring 7 and 8 times you introduce some bias. I believe that words occurring 7 and 8 times in the Voynich text behave differently from words occurring at some other frequencies. I would be curious as to what your results say for words that occur 1 time in the Voynich text.

In which way do you believe they behave differently? Do you have any evidence for your hypothesis?

Words occurring only one time (hapax legomena) are a bad choice for selecting a limited sample. There are over 5500 hapax legomena in the voynich text, whereas the whole idea of a limited sample is to check only a limited number of words. However, to check the more than 5500 words only means that more work is necessary to reach the same result. If you are curious you can check it yourself. Just count the word tokens ending with EVA-m or starting with EVA-d for different positions within a line. Words ending in EVA-m occur more often than expected in line final position and words starting with EVA-d are more common than expected in line initial position (see Timm 2014, p. 85).

However it would be correct to argue that words in Currier B behave a little bit different than words in Currier A. For instance words ending in EVA-m occur more frequently in line final position in Currier B than in Currier A (see Timm 2014, p. 85).

Position of words ending with EVA-m within a line:
           initial  between  final
Currier A       13      169    188
Currier B        4      106    401

While pfeaster and others pursue their good research ideas, maybe it could be a good idea to ponder also the basics.
I have had these questions in my mind for a long time but alas I have no skills nor capabilities to find answers to them.

1. Why the MS creators chose to have 24 glyphs and not more or less? Even numbers are always a bit suspicious.
Is is because the underlying language had the same amout of letters? Classical latin has 23 letters, Greek had 24.
Did the creator somehow estimate or calculate how many glyphs, characters were needed to be able to form all words, labels etc.?
Or did the encoding method require exactly that many, like grilles or wheels...

2. Hapax legomenon?
What kind of writing or encoding process/model/method would produce create 6014 singular (=hapax legomenon) words in a book of 37104 words.
Just a casual gibberish writing couldn't do it, so what would be the characteristics and properties of a writing/production model that would yield so many singular (=hapax legomena) words.
The common properties for producing more singular words are text length and topic, intended audience and production duration.
But the creation of VMS must have used some quite unique method to be able to create 8466 unique words and 6014 singular words. I am not sure if Torsten's autocopy would produce such results without some other process or method behind it.
There is also a possibiity that not all of the 6014 really are singulars, maybe because of different forms of the same word.
How could we envision this process or method? Is it a (by)result of the the used encoding process or something else? Just a byproduct of transliteration?

3. Cryptology?
What makes VMS so special that the decent cryptanalysis methods do not crack it. Cryptos (1-3) and Zodiac were cracked. Enigma and friends too.
They were invented in period of much more understanding of the matters. In 14th and 15th century it was harder to imagine encryption.
What are constraints, characteristics and properties of the VMS that makes it resistant modern cryptanalysis? Is it because it isn't really encrypted at all?
Why not even statistical nor linguistic analysis do not seem to produce strong results? Because it is not text but symbols?

4. Positionality?
This is a bit similar to hapax legomenon. There are some well-known beginning-end combinations, 4o-89. Gallows at the beginnings.
The thing is. Why. It was intended and maybe this kind of rigidity made the production easier. Gallows at the beginning are indicators how to read the blocks, and as the encoding method is such, to understand the text, begin-end markers were required.
But there are too many of these rigidities. Is there any exmple the creator could have seen to get this idea of positionality? Any known language or known text that had these kinds of ideas? It is hard to invent all alone.
What constraints and properties that kind of method would have?


There must be method in the madness as it produced something durable. A method that was flexible enough to allow four persons independently contribute in it and still rigid enough to allow constrained evolution (Currer A->B)-
Could the VMS be a idle passtime work of some prince of Florence? Aristocrats and royals surely had time, money and access to information.
To invent a sufficient number of glyphs to support the text, create a design to each glyph, define a method to produce encoded/encrypted information.
And of course, create the information to write in the book in the first place. Maybe by defining and understanding the constrains, properties, requirements and methods that were needed to produce VMS we could use then get better understanding of the good work of statistics, text analysis and grammar and others .

I am quite sure all of this has been thought before, as most of the things ind the VMS research but still, maybe someone gets some ideas or a-ha moments from it.