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+--- Thread: Torsten Timm's "auto-copying" not incompatible with meaning (/thread-645.html)
Torsten Timm's "auto-copying" not incompatible with meaning - Psillycyber - 18-07-2016
Hi all!
Recently I devised a neat little method to encode messages using the Voynich script. See You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. for that. And if you want to have a crack at solving it without being spoiled first, then you need to STOP READING THIS POST RIGHT NOW.
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In my original post I said that I would reveal the message and the procedure 1 year from now if nobody could figure it out in the meantime. Well, I realized that I'm not that patient
and there are important implications of my method that I wanted to discuss right away, so here we go:With my method, I was able to auto-copy "words" from previous lines that I had already written while still encoding a meaningful message. How was I able to do this? Because I had many degrees of freedom with regards to the choice of each letter. Why was that? Because each letter was really not expressing 1 out of 26 different possibilities, but in my case 1 out of 3 possibilities (more on that below).
We already know that in the VMS certain letters can apparently "replace" or "stand in" for other letters. They appear interchangeable. Therefore, the smallest semantic unit that we should really be dealing with is not the letter, but the "interchangeable group" to which these letters belong.
In my encoding procedure, I divided the Voynich script into 3 groups based off of Brian Cham's "curve/line system":
*curve letters
*line letters
*all others
(Edit: by the way, "a" counts as a dual curve/line letter, as per Brian Cham's system).
I let:
*curve letters represent dots
*line letter represent dashes
*all others represent null values that can be ignored
(Edit: so, to clarify, "a", being both a curve and line letter, is a special letter that single-handedly encodes "dot-dash").
Each "word" in my message then encoded a letter in Morse Code plaintext.
Let's say, for a particular letter, that I needed to encode a Voynich "word" that would go "dot-dot-dot-dash." I had all sorts of words to choose from to accomplish that. If I desired, I could start with a root like "chedy" and simply edit it until I had the desired pattern of curves and lines. I could take something like "4olam" that I had written a line above and just tweak it slightly if I needed to represent a close relative to the preceding dot-dot-dot-dash pattern. I could add gallows and other null characters to obscure the underlying pattern. And I could adhere to certain rigid sequential aesthetic rules (such as having gallows or 4o only in certain places) and still have the freedom to encode the information that I needed. It was not difficult to hold to certain aesthetic conventions (such as 4o only at the beginnings of words) AND encode the message AND do it quickly, especially once I got a few lines down and I could just start copy-pasting and tweaking what I had written immediately above to suit my needs.
And I wasn't even that picky about adhering to ALL of the aesthetic/structural conventions of the VMS. That's why you'll notice that some of my words don't look like proper Voynichese. I basically slapped this page together in about an hour. If I had taken more time on it, I could have made it look reminiscent of Voynichese to an arbitrarily close degree while still encoding the meaning.
In effect, every part of a letter that was not a curve or a line became a "null sub-character" or "null character component." With that many nulls in the message, and with the nulls taking the peculiar form of sub-components of characters, it would become well-nigh impossible to decrypt it. Plus, there was all that freedom to re-arrange those nulls for aesthetic/structural reasons.
But you might think: with so many null components, wouldn't it become cumbersome to decrypt the script back into readable text? Not at all! By the end of composing my message, with just about an hour of practice, I could easily ignore all of the null components and read off dot-dot-dot-dash straight off the page quite fluently.
Now, if you believe that the VMS was written in the 1400s, then of course Morse Code would not have been the plaintext.
But consider that I could have just as easily done something like:
*let 4o represent 2^4
*let all complex curve letters (other than EVA "e") represent 2^3
*let all complex line letters (other than EVA "i") represent 2^2
*let all "e" represent 2^1
*let all "i" represent 1
*let all gallows and other characters be null characters
Each Voynich "word," by adding up its numerical components, would then have a numerical sum which could then be related to a sequential letter of the alphabet. That's another way I could have done it.
Now, I'm not saying that that's the specific way that the VMS was written either. I'm just saying...that's ONE MORE way. There could be tons of possible ways of encoding meaning in the Voynich script if we imagine that letters are encoding a lot less information than we assume they are, and that interchangeable letter groups are really the smallest semantic sub-component rather than individual letters themselves, which could then be varied around, copied, tweaked, etc. simply due to the whims of the author, or his interest in the ease of writing, and/or out of a desire for the appearance of certain rigid aesthetic patterns in word and line structure.
And yes, I'm sure the historians will jump in and say that such ciphers were not known in 1400s Europe. Well, they should know that I also happen to be a fan of Rich SantaColoma's modern forgery hypothesis, and I am by no means wedded to the idea that the Voynich cipher (if it is indeed enciphered) has to be an old cipher.
Most of all, I wish more people would engage with Torsten Timm's mindblowing paper, while at the same time keeping their minds open that the VMS could still have encoded meaning even with all of the evidence that attests to auto-copying, letter interchangeability, weird entropy, weird "word" and line structure, etc. I have shown that it is possible.
Edit: One more thing that I anticipate will be brought up is the labels in the VMS. If each Voynich "word" is only encoding something smaller like a syllable or a letter, then how to the standalone labels make any sense? I don't know. Maybe the intention was to label things not with names, but with numerical values. Maybe it's all misdirection. How do we KNOW that the labels are intended to function as what we would consider to be ordinary name-labels?
RE: Torsten Timm's "auto-copying" not incompatible with meaning - Psillycyber - 19-07-2016
Basically, the auto-copying should put us on the lookout for potential encoding schemes that allow for many ways to encode a message, while allowing for only one way to then unambiguously decode any given encoded string (as my scheme above satisfies).
Sadly, that does expand the potential pool of encoding schemes. If we knew that the encoding scheme had to be a strict 1-to-1 procedure of unique input to unique output back to unique input, then that would severely constrain the possible schemes (as it turns out, it constrains it too severely. Maybe that has been our problem so far—assuming that it has to be a strict 1-to-1 encoding scheme).
Such encoding schemes could potentially rely upon mechanisms at the sub-character level (curve vs. line, type of tail, etc). I hope I'm not the only one who is suspicious about the fact that the Voynich script happens to be so systematically constructed. Naturally-evolved scripts don't look that neat and tidy (it's not just the main curve/line dichotomy, but how the gallows characters are cleanly grouped along 3 dimensions of variation (left loop vs. no left loop, crossing right descender vs. no crossing right descender, and bench vs. no bench), there's the fact that "r" and "s" have the same tail, as do "g" and "h", etc.). It makes me doubt that the Voynich script could be, for example, an extant example of a previously unattested script from Central or Eastern Europe.