[split] Why the VMS text is meaningful or meaningless?

[DonaldFisk]

Because I wrote the blog pages in the order I did the analysis, only correcting things if I subsequently discovered them to be wrong (i.e. mistakes), it's easy to misinterpret what I wrote.    I could have avoided that if I simply wrote a paper after doing the research, leaving out any ideas which I pursued along the way that were eventually dropped, such as that words are composed from prefixes and suffixes.   But I also wanted to show the path the research took, not just the final result.   Perhaps I should have advised people to read my blog backwards.

My theory is that words are composed of individual glyphs, not prefixes and suffixes.   At each state, a glyph is output and then a transition is followed.

I should have been a little clearer. I have read all your webpages, and I do completely understand that you model the set of prefixes and suffixes as two separate state transition models (where the letters o and e appear in three different places and the letters y, d and l all appears twice).

However, it's very hard not to see the way that d, o, l and y appear in both halves as a tidying-up model hack to make the division between prefix model and suffix model seem simpler than it actually is in practice.

The bigger problem I have with each of your two individual state transition models is that I don't believe that the state transitions in either half are independent of the preceding context. That is, the point about practical state machines is that they aim to model not only the connectedness of the transitions but also the exit probabilities, and I really don't believe that this is the case here.

But for me, the biggest problem of all (and this is what I was actually trying to get at before) is that turning the division between prefix and suffix into something like a state transition boundary but mediated by a huge empirical table individually tweaked for each section of the text just isn't a credible explanation. It's a mechanism that can only ever "explain" after the fact (and even then with tons of special case tweaking).

Despite Figure 1 and Figure 2 on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. being separate, I later settled on a single state transition table for each page cluster in the manuscript, so if there's a transition from state A to * in Figure 1 and a transition from * to state B in Figure 2,  it stands for a direct transition from state A to state B.   When generating a word, you start on the start state and end on the finish state in the tables from Table 2 onwards, passing seamlessly through any prefix-suffix boundary.   I'm sorry if I didn't make this sufficiently clear.

There are probably better choices of states, but the aim was to find a set of states good enough to show that the manuscript can be generated from state transition tables.   I think that as some glyphs appear in more than one context within words, they will need more than one state, and as words have different frequencies in different parts of the manuscript, several variants of a template state transition table will be needed.