10-04-2017, 06:42 PM
(10-04-2017, 05:09 PM)nickpelling wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.One of the main criticisms I had of Gordon Rugg's table-and-grille explanation was that it presupposed that a very CompSci mindset was behind it all, which always made what he put forward seem like a modern back projection, i.e. that's he would have done it had it been him but 500+ years earlier.
Which is, of course, nonsensical.
More recently, we've had Don collecting the stats for Voynichese into a relatively fat dictionary and saying that this alone is sufficient to explain Voynichese.
Which, of course, it isn't.
Are you really sure that being able to amass state table and PCA statistics is enough to definitively prove that Voynichese is meaningless as opposed to , say, shorthand and/or enciphered and/or visually confounded in some way?
I'd agree that what you've done would be a good support for a proof that Voynichese isn't trivially a straightforward language: but you're knocking at an open door there for me.
I suppose what's missing to my eyes is the structure of a workable proof that what we're looking at isn't just confounded in some cunning (but perhaps not actually very complex) way.
There's a difference between the material to form a proof from and an actual proof, and I don't yet see how you have made the transition from the former to the latter.
If we knew a priori that there was no meaningful information encoded in the text, and the mystery was how the text was generated, how would my solution look then? You'd then have a variety of theories: Gordon Rugg's, Torsten Timm's, mine, a guy just getting drunk and writing down random words in a specific font, etc. And you could test them to see which worked best, or at all.
Of course a priori we don't know that. But in a century, no one has found any convincing evidence of meaningful information encoded in the text. You might have good reasons to suspect it's there, based on what's known about medieval herbals or alchemical texts or whatever, but that's different from being sure it's there.
My method can generates at least 90% of the words in the original text, in approximately the same relative frequencies found in the original text, accounts for differences seen in different parts of the manuscript, generates text which breaks Zipf's law in exactly the same way as the original text, and has a similar word length distribution. Consider it at the very least as a null hypothesis. If and when someone finds a better explanation - either one which extracts some overall meaning, or a simpler way of generating meaningless text with the same properties as the original - I'll accept that instead.