10-04-2017, 06:40 PM
(10-04-2017, 04:25 PM)DonaldFisk wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.(10-04-2017, 04:04 PM)Anton wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Hi Donald, and welcome to the forum!
What about the state transition probabilities? Do you have any idea on how they are pre-determined by the person who generates the text?
No, that's a historical question. I arrived at them through reverse engineering. The only clue I have is that they vary from one part of the manuscript to another, so after generating the first table (possibly by trial and error?), subsequent tables could be generated by modifying the transition probabilities in the previous table. The You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. shows a distribution from herbal through astronomical and text to biological, so I presume the text was generated in that order (or possibly reverse order).
That, I think, is the key question, because specifying transition probabilities apriori, one would be able not only to generate a "Voynichese"-like text, but also to mimick a natural language (e.g. English), which any side observer (say, some extraterrestrial linguist) will have some difficulty to decide upon whether it's meaninful or meaningless. Bennett in his book gives some examples based on 3rd order letter correlation.
If I'm not mistaken, you imply that the Voynich author (or, rather, in this case, Voynich text-generator) effectively knew (not necessarily literally, but maybe through some "historical mechanism") the statistical characteristics of the text-to-be in advance. Moreover, you simplify his task by dealing not with individual glyphs, but with glyph groups.