Statistics of verbose cipher may be whatever. If you replace one letter with several letters and have several variants for a single letter or you have big chunks of null text with signal hidden among them they you can arrange it all quite freely
(25-09-2026, 02:45 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Of is "verbose cipher" a cryptology jargon term with a more specific meaning?
One symbol can be encrypted using a group of symbols from the cipher alphabet. This is a very broad generalization.
(25-09-2026, 02:45 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I don't see how one can say anything about their statistics.
Character's statistical analysis may become meaningless.
(24-09-2026, 11:09 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.However, Bio/Balneo is clearly a continuous text, not a set of separate entries to be accessed in random order. There are no section headers or marginal notes that would tell the reader where he should start reading to get the information he needs.
That’s exactly what I meant. But compare encrypting 20 pages to encrypting 200+ pages. I think there’s a difference, don’t you? In this form, it’s no longer an appeal to quantity, because 20 is still within the realm of human capability, no matter how complex the cipher might be.
In addition, you can see that the handwriting is consistent throughout Quire 13, but it is sometimes careless and seems “hurried”. This tells us that there was someone who
was willing to write so much text.
The authors of the Herbal and the Astrology texts wrote short excerpts; the scribe of the Herbal B, by the way, also wrote quite a lot (But I assume that this is the author of Astrology)
chenxiang you may be right in your comparison to Ramanujan. It could be possible the one behind the tome was, like Ramanujan, one of those once-in-a-life arch geniuses who came up with the entire theorem and content behind the book. I looked up Ramanujan once I read your post on comparing him to the still-unknown mind behind the text. Initially skimming the Wiki article I thought he was just a savant. But as I went deeper I had to admit he was up there with the likes of my grandpa, my bio grandma, Einstein and von Neumann, all geniuses in their fields involving mathematics. And I think the one who came up with the content was like them, a person who saw the world in a different way. Honestly I think if my grandpa knew of the Voynich manuscript he might have contributed his own work based on his research into the usage of mathematics in astronomy to pinpoint the potential mind.