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+--- Thread: [split] Diplomatic ciphers (/thread-2732.html)
RE: [split] Diplomatic ciphers - Mark Knowles - 10-04-2019
JKP: When you say->
"I am particularly interested in how you recognized them and how you tell them apart."
That is an interesting question and something that had already occurred to me. Now it seems that would not present a problem to the encipherer, but could present a problem to the decipherer. Either you could have a scenario where combinations or sequences of units (as I think you prefer to call them) are such that you could always determine their correspondence as they would be unique as a sequence. Alternatively it may require some intelligence and care on the part of the reader to determine how the text should be read and how to best recognize them apart in difference instances.
RE: [split] Diplomatic ciphers - -JKP- - 10-04-2019
I'm a software developer, so I am comfortable with the phrase "a string of characters processed as a unit" but I don't know if that is meaningful to noncoders. Developers have a different concept of "string" from the string that's in a supermarket.
Maybe forumites can offer some ideas on terminology.
What is a good (not too jargonistic) term for a group of characters that are treated as a unit?
RE: [split] Diplomatic ciphers - Mark Knowles - 10-04-2019
JKP: I should say that given my approach the true underlying text could be as little as 25% of the length of the Voynich text and unlikely to be more than 50% of the length. If spaces are removed from the Voynich text the reduced word length is not necessarily the problem.
However the question of how this fits with labelese is another matter of importance.
I do have other alternative ideas such as things like positional homophonic substitution .i.e. letters are represented with one unit or unit block at the start of a word and with another unit or unit block at the end of a word. If that makes any sense.
As I say one could in theory have a diplomatic cipher with the addition application of anagrams, though as I said before this is not my preferred idea.
Anyway the hypothesis described previously is the one that I am exploring at the moment; we can look at alternative enhanced/atypical diplomatic ciphers later.
RE: [split] Diplomatic ciphers - Anton - 10-04-2019
Quote:What is a good (not too jargonistic) term for a group of characters that are treated as a unit?
A block.
RE: [split] Diplomatic ciphers - -JKP- - 11-04-2019
(10-04-2019, 06:03 PM)Mark Knowles Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....
I do have other alternative ideas such as things like positional homophonic substitution .i.e. letters are represented with one unit or unit block at the start of a word and with another unit or unit block at the end of a word. If that makes any sense.
...
Whether it makes sense isn't really the problem here. That's easy to understand. The problem is how it affects the statistical properties of the VMS text.
If you have a block at the beginning that represents "a" and a different block at the end that represents "a", in text like the VMS where there is already a fairly small character set (compared to substitution ciphers like the diplomatic ciphers), then you very quickly run out of characters or blocks to represent the rest of the alphabet.
RE: [split] Diplomatic ciphers - MarcoP - 11-04-2019
(10-04-2019, 12:37 PM)Mark Knowles Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The similarities to diplomatic ciphers that look very likely to me are:
1) Repeated words being noise i.e. nulls
Hi Mark,
does this mean that in your research you have seen ciphered texts in which repeated words are nulls?
If so, could you please share some of them?
If not, could you please post the closest actual example you have found? [PS: I mean closest under this specific feature]
RE: [split] Diplomatic ciphers - Mark Knowles - 11-04-2019
JKP: It seems to me that there must be a greater number of blocks than there are characters.
i.e. two characters $ and &
four distinct two character long blocks
$&
&$
$$
&&
three characters -> 27 distinct three character long blocks
In other words when you start using blocks instead of individual characters the size of the equivalent character set possible mappings hugely increases.
So you may run of characters to represent the alphabet, but you don't run out of blocks to represent the alphabet, at all, in fact you have more than enough.
RE: [split] Diplomatic ciphers - Mark Knowles - 11-04-2019
JKP: You say
"Whether it makes sense isn't really the problem here. That's easy to understand."
It seems that very often that is the problem as we have had a situation where what I mean hasn't be clear to you from what I have said.
RE: [split] Diplomatic ciphers - -JKP- - 11-04-2019
Quote: Mark: JKP: It seems to me that there must be a greater number of blocks than there are characters.
i.e. two characters $ and &
four distinct two character long blocks
$&
&$
$$
&&
three characters -> 27 distinct three character long blocks
In other words when you start using blocks instead of individual characters the size of the equivalent character set possible mappings hugely increases.
So you may run of characters to represent the alphabet, but you don't run out of blocks to represent the alphabet, at all, in fact you have more than enough.
I'm quite aware of this. It only takes 3 characters to create numerous combinations if they are grouped in twos.
But, this is why I bring up the VMS characteristic of positionality. The VMS is different from substitution ciphers in the way it is structured.
It's not just the position in tokens that is rather rigid, the combinations of tokens are also quite rigid.
These patterns that you posted:
$&
&$
$$
&&
Are very un-VMS-like (yes, I know it's an example, but this example specifically goes contrary to how the VMS is structured).
The VMS tends to have $& but not &$, and only a few characters (mainly ee and ii) are written as $$. Most of the others do not occur in the combinations you suggest.
Example 1: Extremely common biglyph pattern ar
You will find almost 4,000 of occurrences of ar but it is uncommon to find ra (less than 1,000 occurrences BUT the number is MUCH smaller if you accept that there may be other biglphs because it turns out that the first character is actually part of the previous also very common biglyph).
Also, you will not find rr, or aa (only a dozen occurrences and some of those might be "o" rather than "a", it's hard to tell which it is, plus the second "a" is almost always part of an ain sequence and MIGHT be part of an ain "block").
So, out of four combinations based on one of the most common pairs in the VMS, only one is used with any frequency, and the others are rare to nonexistent.
Example 2: Extremely common biglyph pattern dy
There are almost 7,000 occurrences of dy, but there are only a couple of hundred yd and if you look closely at what they are, then you find that the d is usually the beginning of a dain sequence (which is possibly a different block) and that the y is actually part of a preceding dy (in other words dydy occurs but #[font=Eva]dy [/font]where the previous one is not another dy pair generally does not).
The combinations [font=Eva]y[/font][font=Eva]y[/font] and dd are rare and when dd DOES happen, it's usually d preceding the very common dy combination. In other words, it would have to steal part of the adjacent biglyph to be valid.
Example 3: Extremely common biglyph che
There are almost 5500 occurrences of che, but only about 124 occurrences of [font=Eva]ech and those 124 occurrences are almost always stealing the [font=Eva][font=Sans-serif][font=Eva]e[/font][/font] from a preceding biglyph.
There are only 13 occurrences of chch and occurrence of ee (which is frequent) might not be a combination-variation of che because there are sometimes 4 in a row, which means the [font=Eva][font=Sans-serif][font=Eva]e[/font][/font][font=Sans-serif][font=Eva]e[/font][/font][/font] might have to be considered on its own merits to be a biglyph (and might be similar to the minims in daiiin).
[/font][/font]
These are not isolated examples. The text very much works in this way. ar al or ol dy ot che cho ee od (and a few others) occur so frequently and almost always in the same order that I gave them a name, I call them Janus pairs. An extremely high proportion of the manuscript is composed of these simple patterns.
In theory, you can get many combinations by swapping them around. But in the VMS, these various combinations of characters occur less frequently than in natural languages, and significantly less frequently than in theoretic proposals of possible combinations.
I'm not saying biglyphs can't correspond to letters, it's quite possible that they do (I've been trying to make sense of possible multiglyphs for quite a number of years, as you can see from the chart below), but the various combinations of letters that we would expect in natural languages or even in a constructed language based on swapping them around to create more combinations, is quite different from what we observe in the VMS—most of the combinations are one-directional and when they appear to be two-directional, it's often an illusion caused by them being preceded by another instance of the same combination.
This is something I've blogged about in the past, but here's a simple example where I assessed the text for potential biglyph candidates:
![[Image: BiglyphExampleChart.png]](https://voynichportal.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/BiglyphExampleChart.png)
Here's an example of Voynich text that I posted on my blog a couple of years ago:
![[Image: CompressedVMScolored.png]](https://voynichportal.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/CompressedVMScolored.png)
Look at ol and ar in particular, as they are probably the easiest to "see". Notice how they are directional.
A good example of text with clear block patterns (if you want to call them that) is You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. . Look especially at the many ol or ololol che (and of course the aiin sequences).
RE: [split] Diplomatic ciphers - Mark Knowles - 11-04-2019
JKP: I will look through what you have written. I should say that
"it would have to steal part of the adjacent biglyph to be valid"
It could be that a given text has a small number of different possible readings e.g.
"qzppi"
"kkaff"
"hello"
Clearly the decipherer would recognise the correct reading as "hello", because the other readings would be meaningless, so as I said before with blocks the decipherer/reader may have to exert a little intelligence to determine which are the correct blocks in a given instance in order to produce intelligible text.
e.g.
#%#$#
could be blocks
#%# followed by $#
or
#% followed by #$#
where
#%# -> a
$# -> t
#% -> z
#$# -> q
So the whole "word" could map to either
at or zq
(I am not saying this how it does work just floating a possibility.)
Similarly in diplomatic ciphers of the 1440s we see letter pairs mapping to characters. (I date the Voynich to around the early 1430s.)
For example in our context we could have:
$# -> ba
#$ -> oc
$% -> pp
%$ -> fr
Again all these are examples of specific points rather than a general illustration.