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+--- Thread: The Cardan grille approach to the Voynich MS taken to the next level (/thread-3537.html)
RE: The Cardan grille approach to the Voynich MS taken to the next level - MichelleL11 - 06-08-2021
(06-08-2021, 06:24 PM)julian Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I don't want to derail this thread by injecting GA stuff, so will report further on it in my blog :-)
When you explain in your blog post, can you also comment on the second wheel that wasn't used -- how does that work? Is the program told that any of the wheels can be nothing, too?
Thanks in advance for the further discussion of how you produced the wheels.
Michelle
RE: The Cardan grille approach to the Voynich MS taken to the next level - byatan - 11-08-2021
How the wheels would actually be used is is something that interests me, both in terms of dealing with null wheels / spaces and possibilities of creating something beyond simply a vocabulary.
RE: The Cardan grille approach to the Voynich MS taken to the next level - julian - 12-08-2021
(11-08-2021, 10:24 PM)byatan Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.How the wheels would actually be used is is something that interests me, both in terms of dealing with null wheels / spaces and possibilities of creating something beyond simply a vocabulary.
Yes, indeed - it's interesting to speculate. Suppose there were nine wheels, and each wheel is used when making a word 50% of the time: that would produce word lengths that match the distribution we see in the VMS, i.e. binomial of 9. It would also suggest, if the gallows glyphs took up one of the wheels, that words containing a gallows glyph would occur about 50% of the time ... which is approximately the case. But how would the nine wheels actually be used to encipher plaintext words? Do the rarer VMS words with more than one gallows mean that the wheels were traversed more than once?
RE: The Cardan grille approach to the Voynich MS taken to the next level - MichelleL11 - 12-08-2021
(12-08-2021, 01:55 AM)julian Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.(11-08-2021, 10:24 PM)byatan Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.How the wheels would actually be used is is something that interests me, both in terms of dealing with null wheels / spaces and possibilities of creating something beyond simply a vocabulary.Do the rarer VMS words with more than one gallows mean that the wheels were traversed more than once?
The thing that has caught my imagination is the way the wheels can be used to make the same Voynichese word using different wheel combinations (see Julian's blog post You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) - thus possibly encoding completely different plaintext words. It is so weird it just could be the explanation for the unusual whole word serial repetition, yet the seeming lack of repetition of other, longer whole word patterns seen in Voynichese. Could the authors have been so caught up in their "system" that they didn't realize it how difficult this would be for reversing the cipher?
I guess the million dollar question is how can we figure out now which wheels represent what plaintext letters? Sorry to state the obvious but I'm really not sure what the next step would be. Any ideas?
RE: The Cardan grille approach to the Voynich MS taken to the next level - julian - 12-08-2021
(12-08-2021, 04:16 AM)MichelleL11 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.(12-08-2021, 01:55 AM)julian Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.(11-08-2021, 10:24 PM)byatan Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.How the wheels would actually be used is is something that interests me, both in terms of dealing with null wheels / spaces and possibilities of creating something beyond simply a vocabulary.Do the rarer VMS words with more than one gallows mean that the wheels were traversed more than once?
The thing that has caught my imagination is the way the wheels can be used to make the same Voynichese word using different wheel combinations (see Julian's blog post You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) - thus possibly encoding completely different plaintext words. It is so weird it just could be the explanation for the unusual whole word serial repetition, yet the seeming lack of repetition of other, longer whole word patterns seen in Voynichese. Could the authors have been so caught up in their "system" that they didn't realize it how difficult this would be for reversing the cipher?
I guess the million dollar question is how can we figure out now which wheels represent what plaintext letters? Sorry to state the obvious but I'm really not sure what the next step would be. Any ideas?
Nothing is obvious in this Voynich game :-) The authors probably thought their system was obvious, as they twisted their cipher wheels, and look where we are ...
One train of thought about wheels (or tables, or whatever they might be) is that *if* there are nine wheels being used, and *if* each wheel has a 50% chance of being used, then all we need to do is look at all the long VMS words to find out which glyphs are on each wheel. Because if a VMS word has length nine, we know that all the wheels were used. So if we look at all VMS words of length nine, we should be able to assemble the set of glyphs which were on each wheel.
But this must be too simple.
RE: The Cardan grille approach to the Voynich MS taken to the next level - Koen G - 12-08-2021
If the series of wheels can be traversed more than once and each wheel has a 50 percent chance of being used, then words of length 9 are more likely to be made up of multiple passes, right?
RE: The Cardan grille approach to the Voynich MS taken to the next level - julian - 12-08-2021
(12-08-2021, 07:15 AM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.If the series of wheels can be traversed more than once and each wheel has a 50 percent chance of being used, then words of length 9 are more likely to be made up of multiple passes, right?
If multiple passes are allowed, yes. But that probably throws off the distributions, so I'm not sure it's valid. Also, I no longer think there are 9 wheels, I think there are 12 or maybe 13, after re-examining the statistics.