25-04-2017, 10:41 AM
(23-04-2017, 10:08 PM)DonaldFisk wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I carried out this test, and confirmed that words in the manuscript are independent of the previous word (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). The mean frequency of word pairs was very close to the expected probability (the product of the probabilities of the two words considered separately), but the frequency's variance was very close to the square of the mean (i.e. a Gamma distribution, in my generated text it was a Poisson distribution), suggesting that the mechanism I initially suggested for deciding on transition paths, and only that, was wrong. As far as I know, no one had spotted this before.
I'm sorry but this is completely inconclusive.
Your figure 1 shows a strong deviation from randomness.
Still, also that is not conclusive in the other direction.
What completely lacks is evidence (metrics) for:
- what should be the statistical behaviour of a meaningful text
- how much variation there would be in this
The analysis is based on the assumption that every word type in the Voynich MS should consistently represent the same word in some plain text. This is not at all certain.
If the Voynich MS text includes null characters, all word combination statistics are completely thrown off.
There was a thread here in the voynich.ninja where there was a strong indication that the repeating sequence statistics in the MS are not that different from a known plain text.
(Of course also that is not conclusive for the same reason: "not that different" is not sufficiently defined).
My summary is:
- there are indications that the text could be meaningful
- there are indications that the text could be meaningless
Both are still inconclusive.
Some papers concentrate more on one or the other, but other papers do state both.