23-04-2020, 09:30 PM
(23-04-2020, 06:54 PM)-JKP- wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I have worked out rules that work for a great majority of the text, enough that I can tell if something is legal Voynichese, and enough to reproduce "legal" chunks of text but I have not fully worked out an order for the tokens. I have struggled with this for years, but I haven't gotten discouraged. I think it might be possible. What I can do is classify many of them into family groups.
Classifying Voynichese glyphs into family groups and creating an order for them ad hoc is all I essentially had in mind. Correct me if I'm wrong, but what you're talking about sounds quite a bit more ambitious. I interpret what you wrote as saying that it may be possible to discern a pre-established order to the glyphs, after getting to know the entire body of text intimately well enough, even without any idea what any of them signify. But if this is what you're saying, I don't think I'd find you making your case for a pre-established Voynichese alphabetical order a boring read at all.
-JKP- wrote:I can get some good results on subsets of tokens or particular sections, but don't yet have something that explains it all. There are places here and there where a character inexplicably shows up in a place where it shouldn't. It doesn't happen often, but it happens often enough that I wonder if there's a dynamic that I haven't sorted out correctly. I don't want to write it off as scribal error. I'd rather search for the reason until I've exhausted all possibilities.
If I were an idle rich geek, I'd hold a contest, modeled on engineers' egg drop and load-bearing bridge building contests, called the Build-a-Vord Challenge. Each entrant would have a set amount of time (a couple of months, maybe) to design an algorithm that generates Voynichese vords. Each one would be modeled and run for 38,000 cycles with the same hardware and software. The entrant whose algorithm output had the highest ratio of types actually found in the VMS to types not found in the original, would get a large donation made by me to a charity of their choice, or a scholarship, or something like that.