The Voynich Ninja

(26-06-2026, 04:27 AM)BessAgritianin Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.[..]
    Has the community become so attached to the pursuit of the answer, 
                    that it no long wants the answer itself?
    "The journey is its own reward!"- but is that sentiment blocking the destination?

Looks to me more like some answers are more "blocked" or ignored, as they do not fit into the expectations of a (loud) majority... the more welcomed "Alpine"/Latin/Italian/German solution is just -- not coming, those attempts fail the fastest, with good entropy or without.

JoJo_Jost Wrote:[..]there are some here who just criticize everything on autopilot, and you can tell they often haven’t even looked into the topic. Those are usually the frustrated ones who are just trying to defend their own half-baked theories.
But most people here are experts—meaning they’ve been working with the VMS for a very long time and have seen many solutions come and go. [..]

Apart from the "expert" debate: several long-year "solvers" easily appear within the first group here...

rikforto Wrote:[..]The example of the many solvers who do not address the entropy [..]

Why should they?
I played a bit with "DG97EEB" / Ed's stats page last week (VMS source text is represented by the 2nd column of numbers):



When you turn to the transliterations of "Glen Claston" , it shows quite normal h2 values near 2.9, which is quite ok for medieval texts, while Takahashi and Zandbergen translits stay at 2.1 ~ 2.3.
Or has somebody made a mistake?

Obviously, it depends not only upon EVA or non-EVA understandings of VMS character set, but also on the whole following transliteration.
"Glen Claston" (I know his real name was different) was not more or less solid in VMS works as others;
so the rammed-in stake of "VMS entropy is much too low, just 2.4!" might not be that undisputable stop-sign at all?

And...

JoJo_Jost Wrote:
[..]Take substitution alphabets, for example. That fundamentally contradicts the structure of the VMS.[..]

Quite open: there is not even any common ground about the vaild set and number of Voynichese characters here, so speaking about "the structure of the VMS" (which we have not really an idea of) is, let's say, more than theoretical...

It might be a bit tiring for those who lasted in this forum many years now, to see again and again new "solutions", but for those "agreed-upon" topics which may speak against that all: when did you check your bases last time?

(26-06-2026, 04:46 PM)Stefan Wirtz_2 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Looks to me more like some answers are more "blocked" or ignored, as they do not fit into the expectations of a (loud) majority... the more welcomed "Alpine"/Latin/Italian/German solution is just -- not coming, those attempts fail the fastest, with good entropy or without.

This looks like the variant of the claim I mentioned above, that we don't want the language to be XYZ.  

It's also not true.  Read through some of the threads on the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. for the languages you mention and see if you still think they were more welcomed.  Try this You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. or You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..  You can see they are given a hard time.  

When I think of a solution that was initially welcomed, the only one I can think of was the Turkic one.  That's not from the region you mention.  It got a lot of good will from some people but went downhill when it emerged it was like other solutions.

(26-06-2026, 04:46 PM)Stefan Wirtz_2 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(26-06-2026, 04:27 AM)BessAgritianin Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.[..]
    Has the community become so attached to the pursuit of the answer, 
                    that it no long wants the answer itself?
    "The journey is its own reward!"- but is that sentiment blocking the destination?

Looks to me more like some answers are more "blocked" or ignored, as they do not fit into the expectations of a (loud) majority... the more welcomed "Alpine"/Latin/Italian/German solution is just -- not coming, those attempts fail the fastest, with good entropy or without.

JoJo_Jost Wrote:[..]there are some here who just criticize everything on autopilot, and you can tell they often haven’t even looked into the topic. Those are usually the frustrated ones who are just trying to defend their own half-baked theories.
But most people here are experts—meaning they’ve been working with the VMS for a very long time and have seen many solutions come and go. [..]

Apart from the "expert" debate: several long-year "solvers" easily appear within the first group here...

rikforto Wrote:[..]The example of the many solvers who do not address the entropy [..]

Why should they?
I played a bit with "DG97EEB" / Ed's stats page last week (VMS source text is represented by the 2nd column of numbers):



When you turn to the transliterations of "Glen Claston" , it shows quite normal h2 values near 2.9, which is quite ok for medieval texts, while Takahashi and Zandbergen translits stay at 2.1 ~ 2.3.
Or has somebody made a mistake?

Obviously, it depends not only upon EVA or non-EVA understandings of VMS character set, but also on the whole following transliteration.
"Glen Claston" (I know his real name was different) was not more or less solid in VMS works as others;
so the rammed-in stake of "VMS entropy is much too low, just 2.4!" might not be that undisputable stop-sign at all?

And...

JoJo_Jost Wrote:
[..]Take substitution alphabets, for example. That fundamentally contradicts the structure of the VMS.[..]

Quite open: there is not even any common ground about the vaild set and number of Voynichese characters here, so speaking about "the structure of the VMS" (which we have not really an idea of) is, let's say, more than theoretical...

It might be a bit tiring for those who lasted in this forum many years now, to see again and again new "solutions", but for those "agreed-upon" topics which may speak against that all: when did you check your bases last time?

I'm fairly sure they are correct, but if anyone does spot a mistake, shout and I can update easily

About conditional character entropy (h2), you can make this arbitrarily high by allowing for a huge glyph set. An easy way to do this is by looking for tiny differences between versions of your chosen glyph (like "a" or "o") and assigning a unique character to each one. There are other ways as well. 

Well, to be more precise, the absolute number of different glyphs (h0) is not relevant, but h1 is. For example, if I use one special character "ç" in a novel, this will increase h0, but it will not affect any other statistic. However, if I randomly replace half of "c" by "ç" in a text, this will increase h0, h1 and h2.

Put differently, if you create more chaos by adding new glyphs in large numbers, you do increase conditional entropy but also the size of the alphabet and the way it is balanced. Therefore, h1 and h2 are best compared in tandem.


But when I talk about the entropy problem, that's just shorthand for saying "q is always followed by o, why do so many words end with "n", why is this "n" so often preceded by a number of minims, which in turn are preceded by "a", what's up with "ed, ched and edy", what's up with gallow placement, and if we ignore the frequent suffixes, what's actually left of the root of words? etc etc etc". There are very concrete problems lurking behind these statistics. 

Solvers ignore this and keep ignoring this when they have it pointed out to them, because they cherry pick words that "work" and then creatively interpret the output. They all choose their own way of adding information to the text that isn't there (= increasing entropy), which is why all their solutions work just as well.

No solver understands that the script is the most normal part.

(26-06-2026, 04:27 AM)BessAgritianin Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.    "The journey is its own reward!"- but is that sentiment blocking the destination?

"The real treasure is not the goal of the journey, but all the programs we wrote along the way."

All the best, --stolfi

(26-06-2026, 05:38 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.But when I talk about the entropy problem, that's just shorthand for saying "q is always followed by o, why do so many words end with "n", why is this "n" so often preceded by a number of minims, which in turn are preceded by "a", what's up with "ed, ched and edy", what's up with gallow placement, and if we ignore the frequent suffixes, what's actually left of the root of words? etc etc etc". There are very concrete problems lurking behind these statistics. 

I agree with this, and a minority opinion I have is that the primacy of the statistical formulation is quite unfortunate; it's obviously a qualitative problem that could be formulated in a great many ways with a great many qualifications. I do not go to die on this hill because I believe the h2 statistics capture it just fine, and went with that formulation because I assumed it would be a familiar shorthand widely held and thus not become The Topic. But contra the idea that there are sacred cows no one dare slaughter, virtually any example remains a hot button issue that can derail a thread. (Perhaps I could have picked the carbon dating, as everyone agrees that was done correctly and can be straightforwardly interpreted---wait, sorry, getting a bunch of DMs about that, hang on.)

Let it also be said a solver who made this argument following this question, whether I agree or not, would count for me as having addressed it:

(26-06-2026, 04:46 PM)Stefan Wirtz_2 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Why should they? [...]

This is...not the typical solver, to say the least.

The problem is that when you delve deeply into the structures of the VMS, you recognize structures that actually make it very easy to immediately rule out a very large portion of the solutions.

But most solvers don’t want to hear that - because then it becomes very complicated to find any solution at all.... And that has nothing to do with language, transcriptions, or many other factors. Entropy and the number of glyphs are among the least significant problems here. 

More interesting are questions regarding word lengths, hapaxes, the long-range effects of various glyph structures, the deeper structures of the Laafu effects, and much more. Anyone who fails to incorporate these structural properties into their theory is fighting a losing battle and doesn’t even realize it.

I would definitely like to see a solution that stands up to criticism and anyone can follow the logic and repeat it on their own. My personal contributions are decades old, but I hope they actually somehow contributed to someone’s thinking process. I tried my own version of a Chinese theory with built in tone markers that of course could not be compared to an actual language. I also imagined a musical encoding of some sort, etc. 

The old VMSList did have some rather aggressive exchanges and people did occasionally get a little personal, but there was definitely a great amount of discovery and analysis along the way.

I think there’s a lot more tolerance for different views on ninja other than the obvious dismissal of AI slop.

(26-06-2026, 07:34 PM)Grove Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I think there’s a lot more tolerance for different views on ninja other than the obvious dismissal of AI slop.

I can't say that I have found that is there is much tolerance for different views on Ninja and I have been interacting with this forum for many years now. But in my case it doesn't bother me much as I just continue to gradually pursue my own line of research which seems to be increasingly independent of the discussions here. Then again, in my own case, there are many views that I don't have much tolerance for either. So, I don't have a problem with intolerance. I think what I do find problematic is when people believe they are experts on the Voynich manuscript and so can lecture others. There is nobody alive who can be definitively said to be an expert on the Voynich manuscript. This is because everyone knows so little for certain about the manuscript.

(26-06-2026, 08:41 PM)Mark Knowles Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. I think what I do find problematic is when people believe they are experts on the Voynich manuscript and so can lecture others. There is nobody alive who can be definitively said to be an expert on the Voynich manuscript. This is because everyone knows so little for certain about the manuscript.

I have a bit of a problem with expert as well. I prefer researchers or enthusiasts who enjoy studying the manuscript.