The Voynich Ninja
A case for Gibberish - Printable Version

+- The Voynich Ninja (https://www.voynich.ninja)
+-- Forum: Voynich Research (https://www.voynich.ninja/forum-27.html)
+--- Forum: Analysis of the text (https://www.voynich.ninja/forum-41.html)
+--- Thread: A case for Gibberish (/thread-3366.html)

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

A case for Gibberish - Voynichgibberish - 24-09-2020

A case for Gibberish and no one should suffer anymore by the hands of the Voynich Author

[Image: random-vms-schinner-conclusion.jpg]

Anyone reading this please have mercy on me for passing any judgments upon the Voynich Manuscript, as I know this is a contentious topic for everyone involved.  Over the years I've looked at the manuscript's text searching for any meaning whatsoever.  I have run dozens of frequency analysis on several languages and compared it to the Voynich Manuscript to no avail.  I even compared it to classical and modern ciphers and I could not fetter out a rational input and output cipher with languages which resembled normalcy of its kind.  The output just became garbled so to speak.  Lastly I began to think this was a created language and it only held meaning to the owner or a group, but that's when I woke up after reading the Random Walk Pdf by Schinner.

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Here is some bullet points to ponder before going down the path of a literal translation of the VMS:

  1. VMS contains a low use of 1-2 tokens
  2. NO evidence for punctuation in the VMS whatsoever.
  3. Tokens repeat geometrically to often compared to languages
  4. Even in the modern era there is no decryption for the VMS
  5. If this was an invented language it still should obey a normal language rhythm for token repeats
  6. otol is a label for a star, plant and a empty pipe
  7. Lastly what likely would be consonants can be found at times as 1 character tokens
If you are a person trying to decode the Voynich Manuscript I would HIGHLY and its capped for a reason, go on and read the Schinner paper with the link I provided.  In my opinion stop wasting your time.  Its a dice roll of randomness and the text contains gibberish.
[Image: voynich-random-walk-is-high.jpg]


RE: A case for Gibberish - Mark Knowles - 24-09-2020

(24-09-2020, 12:15 AM)Voynichgibberish Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
A case for Gibberish and no one should suffer anymore by the hands of the Voynich Author

[Image: random-vms-schinner-conclusion.jpg]

Anyone reading this please have mercy on me for passing any judgments upon the Voynich Manuscript, as I know this is a contentious topic for everyone involved.  Over the years I've looked at the manuscript's text searching for any meaning whatsoever.  I have run dozens of frequency analysis on several languages and compared it to the Voynich Manuscript to no avail.  I even compared it to classical and modern ciphers and I could not fetter out a rational input and output cipher with languages which resembled normalcy of its kind.  The output just became garbled so to speak.  Lastly I began to think this was a created language and it only held meaning to the owner or a group, but that's when I woke after reading the Random Walk Pdf by Schinner.

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Here is some bullet points to ponder before going down the path of a literal translation of the VMS:

  1. VMS contains a low use of 1-2 tokens
  2. NO evidence for punctuation in the VMS whatsoever.
  3. Tokens repeat geometrically to often compared to languages
  4. Even in the modern era there is no decryption for the VMS
  5. If this was an invented language it still should obey a normal language rhythm for token repeats
  6. otol is a label for a star, plant and a empty pipe
  7. Lastly what likely would be consonants can be found at times as 1 character tokens
If you are a person trying to decode the Voynich Manuscript I would HIGHLY and its capped for a reason, go on and read the Schinner paper with the link I provided.  In my opinion stop wasting your time.  Its a dice roll of randomness and the text contains gibberish.
[Image: voynich-random-walk-is-high.jpg]

I am glad you pointed out (6). Examples of a number of quite distinct things having the same label struck me as very problematic. However I suppose I hold what might be regarded as a compromise position, i.e. that some of the text is gibberish or "filler" and some contains meaning; this is not unusual for ciphers.

RE: A case for Gibberish - -JKP- - 24-09-2020

(24-09-2020, 12:15 AM)Voynichgibberish Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....
Here is some bullet points to ponder before going down the path of a literal translation of the VMS:

  1. VMS contains a low use of 1-2 tokens
  2. NO evidence for punctuation in the VMS whatsoever.
  3. Tokens repeat geometrically to often compared to languages
  4. Even in the modern era there is no decryption for the VMS
  5. If this was an invented language it still should obey a normal language rhythm for token repeats
  6. otol is a label for a star, plant and a empty pipe
  7. Lastly what likely would be consonants can be found at times as 1 character tokens
...

  1. only if you take spaces as literal, they may not be
  2. that's not uncommon for medieval manuscripts
  3. doesn't matter if it turns out to be a verbose code or multi-glyph characters, then this would be expected to happen. Alternately, there are languages where significantly different concepts are expressed with the exact same spelling (see my blog on Chechen).
  4. cool, more to study
  5. probably so, but we don't know yet if it is an invented language
  6. doesn't matter, it could be a reference label, an abbreviation, or an adjective rather than a noun
  7. there is no evidence yet for what is a consonant or a vowel, but in the medieval period consonants and vowels were frequently single characters that stood for abbreviations

Sometimes what appears to be an intractable problem is merely a sympton of insufficient imagination.

RE: A case for Gibberish - Voynichgibberish - 24-09-2020

Quote:
  1. only if you take spaces as literal, they may not be
  2. that's not uncommon for medieval manuscripts
  3. doesn't matter if it turns out to be a verbose code or multi-glyph characters, then this would be expected to happen. Alternately, there are languages where significantly different concepts are expressed with the exact same spelling (see my blog on Chechen).
  4. cool, more to study
  5. probably so, but we don't know yet if it is an invented language
  6. doesn't matter, it could be a reference label, an abbreviation, or an adjective rather than a noun
  7. there is no evidence yet for what is a consonant or a vowel, but in the medieval period consonants and vowels were frequently single characters that stood for abbreviations

Sometimes what appears to be an intractable problem is merely a sympton of insufficient imagination.

Dear JKP,

My imagination is quite healthy, because I have peered into the Voynich Manuscript since 2009, thank you very much!

I do take the spaces literally, because they are used and are there.  How common is it for a manuscript with so many references, images and ideas to have no punctuation from medieval times; that's 240 pages long to not have any punctuation whatsoever, can you reference any others?  From Bullet points 3 & 5 you seemed conflicted admitting yes and no to repeats for languages and geometric repeats are different from repeated words that are right next to each other.  JKP have you read Schinner paper?  I think the label is very evident from the way the imagery is simplistic so to is the label even if it came from a mechanism which produced random gibberish.  Lastly all languages usually contain a finite (low amount I should say) amount of vowels and a simple scan would show an abundance of lonely glyph characters which also stand out against a frequency attack.

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

RE: A case for Gibberish - -JKP- - 24-09-2020

(24-09-2020, 02:03 AM)Voynichgibberish Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Dear JKP,

My imagination is quite healthy, because I have peered into the Voynich Manuscript since 2009, thank you very much!


It was not intended as an insult. It's simply a statement of how I see things. I have seen many situations where looking deeper or wider can provide less-obvious answers.

Quote:I do take the spaces literally, because they are used and are there.


Ciphers often obfuscate spaces. I don't know if the VMS is a cipher, but if it is, then we should always be suspicious of spaces, especially when entropy doesn't appear to add up.


Quote:How common is it for a manuscript with so many references, images and ideas to have no punctuation from medieval times; that's 240 pages long to not have any punctuation whatsoever, can you reference any others?


There are many that lack commas and periods, but they make up for the lack of these by having many abbreviations, and some of those are indicated with symbols. So, it depends how broadly you define punctuation. If the VMS is a cipher, there might be a glyph standing in for a phrase break. In fact, I'll nominate the gallows chars as one possibility. Note how frequently they occur at the beginnings of paragraphs. That is not how letters usually behave. In medieval texts, capitula (pilcrows) are frequently used to break up phrases within paragraphs. I have posted several examples.


Quote:From Bullet points 3 & 5 you seemed conflicted admitting yes and no to repeats for languages and geometric repeats are different from repeated words that are right next to each other.


Conflicted? I'm not conflicted. There is more than one way to look at it. That's not a conflict, it's a range of possibilities. Read my blog on Chechen. There are natural languages that use the same spelling for completely different words. Also, if the tokens are syllables rather than words, then one would EXPECT a high degree of repetition. If the tokens are numbers, then one would also expect a high degree of repetition.


Quote:JKP have you read Schinner paper?  I think the label is very evident from the way the imagery is simplistic so to is the label even if it came from a mechanism which produced random gibberish.  Lastly all languages usually contain a finite (low amount I should say) amount of vowels and a simple scan at for glyphs would show an abundance of lonely  glyphs characters which also stand out against a frequency attack.


Yes, I have read the Schinner/Timm papers. I think they should be required reading. There are very few papers about the VMS text that explore the patterns in a wholistic way and I think they have done quite a good job of this. That does not mean I necessarily agree with the conclusion. I can see other ways in which such patterns could manifest without autocopying.

RE: A case for Gibberish - Voynichgibberish - 24-09-2020

[font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]Dear Mark,[/font]
[font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]
Quote:[/font]

I am glad you pointed out (6). Examples of a number of quite distinct things having the same label struck me as very problematic. However I suppose I hold what might be regarded as a compromise position, i.e. that some of the text is gibberish or "filler" and some contains meaning; this is not unusual for ciphers.



That's a good point regarding the possibility of the voynich being a cipher, yet the availability of complex ciphers were non-existent in the early 15th century and this manuscript would have been decoded by now, because the simple ciphers were only available.

As for languages invented and known there is a way to spot gibberish and you can find that out by reading the Schinner PDF.  Even random texts obey the Zipf's Law.  Schinner elaborates upon the high amount of geometrically placed repeating words in the VMS and its based on word distance.  The VMS was an anomaly when compared to German, Latin, Mandarin and English and it was a huge outlier stats wise for repeat distance of words.

Quote:Although Zipf's Law holds for all languages, even non-natural ones like You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.,You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. the reason is still not well understood.You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. However, it may be partially explained by the statistical analysis of randomly generated texts. Wentian Li has shown that in a document in which each character has been chosen randomly from a uniform distribution of all letters (plus a space character), the "words" with different lengths follow the macro-trend of the Zipf's law (the more probable words are the shortest with equal probability).You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., in a paper entitled On the Statistical Laws of Linguistic Distribution, offers a mathematical derivation. He took a large class of well-behaved You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (not only the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) and expressed them in terms of rank. He then expanded each expression into a You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. In every case Belevitch obtained the remarkable result that a first-order truncation of the series resulted in Zipf's law. Further, a second-order truncation of the Taylor series resulted in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

So what to do to be more focused with Voynich studies, would be to find the exact algorithm which produces random  VMS text. If one finds a 95% accuracy for the VMS text generation then in my mind he/she will have finally solved the Voynich Gibberish case!

I know Torsten Timm has gone down this path, however I don't think he has had a an equivalency of a 95% success rate.

RE: A case for Gibberish - ReneZ - 24-09-2020

It's a bit disappointing to still see references to Wentian Li's paper.

I wonder how many people who refer to it have actually read it?

When Gabriel Landini wrote his Cryptologia paper about the Zipf law in the Voynich MS, 19 years ago, it was already understood that this describes something very different.

The words in that process are generated using an algorithm that creates words of ever increasing length. Nothing like language.
It cannot be used as evidence that arbitrary language-like text should follow the Zipf law.

RE: A case for Gibberish - MarcoP - 24-09-2020

(24-09-2020, 04:07 AM)Voynichgibberish Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.So what to do to be more focused with Voynich studies, would be to find the exact algorithm which produces random  VMS text. If one finds a 95% accuracy for the VMS text generation then in my mind he/she will have finally solved the Voynich Gibberish case!

I know Torsten Timm has gone down this path, however I don't think he has had a an equivalency of a 95% success rate.

My personal opinion is that, in order to compute a numerical similarity like "95%", you need a formally defined set of quantitative features to compare (e.g. bigram and word histograms, character and word entropies, reduplication rate, Schinner's alpha of F(l) etc.). When you have a formal definition of the text you want to obtain, as well as an example of an actual text conforming to it (the VMS), I believe that creating the software is just a matter of putting enough effort into it. I don't claim it will be easy, but it seems obvious that it can be done.

As I think Koen pointed out when discussing Timm and Schinner's paper, if you define a set of high-level quantitative features for Shakespeare's sonnets, one can write a software generating text with those properties. The output of the software will possibly be sonnets from the metrical point of view, but it will be meaningless. This would not prove that Shakespeare's English is meaningless.

There could be people that would be interested in a closer computational simulation of Voynichese, but many are not. For instance, Torsten Timm explained why writing a more complex software would be a waste of time:

(25-06-2019, 12:00 AM)Torsten Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
(23-06-2019, 06:49 PM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Also, please correct me if I am wrong, but I think the generated text here doesn't feature any clear dependency between the last glyph of a word and the first glyph of the next word?

"Keep in mind that the VMS was created by a human writer who had complete freedom to vary some details of the generating algorithm on the spur of a moment. ..." (Timm & Schinner 2019, p. 16). With other words we didn't argue that the text was created by a computer program and we didn't argue that our program is able to simulate the complexity of a human mind.

Beside line breaks numerous similar rules for describing some kind of local repetition exists. Even if I would try to add each rule it would still be possible to point to an another similar rule. At the same time each additional rule would increase the complexity of the program and it would be argued that the program is too sophisticated. Therefore our goal was to keep the algorithm as simple as possible.

If you really want to give this a try, you can download Timm and Schinner's sources from github and start from there. But you seem to be already convinced that it's gibberish, so I can't think of any reason for doing that.

I have spent several hours browsing through Timm and Schinner's java software. Though it is not huge (the core is about 10,000 lines of code) I have only seen a small part of it. You should expect that nobody will ever look into anything more complex.

EDIT You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. Wrote:My manuscript, you inspire me to write.
I love the way you disturb and puzzle,
Invading my mind day and through the night,
Always dreaming about the laid mizzle.

Let me compare you to a foul ember?
You are more ancient, random and cryptic.
Past winds shake the leafage of September,
And autumntime has the afraid triptych.

How do I love you? Let me count the ways.
I love your repetitions, words and text.
Thinking of your loathsome words fills my days.
My love for you is the funny pretext.

Now I must away with a sunny heart,
Remember my old words whilst we're apart.


RE: A case for Gibberish - Mark Knowles - 24-09-2020

(24-09-2020, 02:03 AM)Voynichgibberish Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Quote: doesn't matter, it could be a reference label, an abbreviation, or an adjective rather than a noun

[font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]
[/font]
Yes, I would agree with you that JKP's explanation is not a sufficiently persuasive one. If it is a reference label, how and where can one find the thing to which it refers? If it is an abbreviation then it would have to be so brief as to be virtually useless in identifying the word it is abbreviated from, which is particularly significant in the case of the often very specific drawings that labels are attached to. It is hard to see how the same adjectives could be applied to such specific drawings. Another point worth noting is that distinct repeated labels often have very similar spellings.
[font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]
Quote:[/font]
[font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]
Quote:[/font]
Sometimes what appears to be an intractable problem is merely a sympton of insufficient imagination.
Dear JKP,

My imagination is quite healthy, because I have peered into the Voynich Manuscript since 2009, thank you very much!
I must admit I was amused by this you hit back with a classic JKP style line, namely you stated the number of years you had been studying the Voynich.

RE: A case for Gibberish - Mark Knowles - 24-09-2020

(24-09-2020, 04:07 AM)Voynichgibberish Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.[font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]Dear Mark,[/font]
[font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]
Quote:[/font]

I am glad you pointed out (6). Examples of a number of quite distinct things having the same label struck me as very problematic. However I suppose I hold what might be regarded as a compromise position, i.e. that some of the text is gibberish or "filler" and some contains meaning; this is not unusual for ciphers.


That's a good point regarding the possibility of the voynich being a cipher, yet the availability of complex ciphers were non-existent in the early 15th century and this manuscript would have been decoded by now, because the simple ciphers were only available.

Not necessarily, it can be very hard to decode ciphers with a significant amount of filler text.