The Voynich Ninja

I think in the Stars/Recipe section the average number of words per line is about 9. This is obviously lowered a fair bit by the short last lines of paragraphs. But even if full lines average at (say) 12 words, that's still the potential for 8% of all words to be affected by line first transformations. Yet bear in mind that at least some line end words are statistically different, specifically the occurrence of [m].

We're really looking for the number of repeating phrases that would be found exclusively within a line of ten or fewer words without either touching or breaking over the beginning or end of lines. We should also, potentially exclude the first lines of paragraphs because of the presence of single leg gallows.

There are lots of observations we have made that help to explain why the text might repeat less than it should. We simply don't know if they're important, or how we might retransform that text to arrive back at "normal". I did a lot of work trying to figure out how to reverse line first transformations, but unfortunately it was rather fruitless. It seems to be a complex system of changes and replacements, though I am convinced that it is systematic--there's hope that we can figure it out one day (and that it will be hugely insightful).

(03-03-2016, 11:16 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.With this small number of repeated sequences, your estimated values should be reasonable. The only problem I see is that of the 55 changed sequences with an 8.5% error rate, there will eventually be more than one change in the same sequence, so one would need a bit higher error rate.

My goal was to determine the smallest error rate which could destroy half of the repeated sequences, so 8.5% and 46% would be a minimum.

Although, i now see that i should also have subtracted the number of affected words in each round. This would lower the error rates i gave to 8.25% and 38%.

Also, in Pliny, there are 24 five-word sequences, each of which accounts for 2 four-word sequences. In these cases, a single error can eliminate two repeated sequences.

In Pliny there are also 10 six-word sequences and 4 seven-word sequences, which means that the minimum error rates of 8.5% and 38% would need to be lowered further.

I agree that any type of systematic mutation of line-initial and line-final words could by itself largely justify the number of repeated sequences of four or more words.