[Blog Post] Peter Bakker on the VMS

[ReneZ]

Hi Rene,
the calculations I posted are my own. They are certainly based on brute force and do not assume anything clever. I just wanted to point out that the search space is huge: my feeling is that one is going to fall into local minima, maybe better than those found by Yokubinas, Cheshire, Ardic &C, but still inconclusive.

Many of the statistics we already have are making both specific cases rather unlikely.

I am not sure you mean what I hope you mean Please be more specific.

Hi Marco,

so I was reading a bit too fast... I have almost no time these days.
However it makes no fundamental difference.

I hope to write a bit more this evening.

I still meant to write more about this.

One of the fundamental questions for me is whether it is possible to make a 1-to-1 mapping of Voynich words to plain text words in some language, and arrive at a meaningful text.

Such a mapping could follow some logic, for example in case of a simple substitution cipher, or no logic at all, in case the words are simply enumerated in a list. While these two cases are very different from the point of view of deciphering, for the present question they are the same. The enumeration option was one of your two examples.

The point is that it does not seem to be too likely to be possible, due to the strange statistics of repeating word sequences.
This does not mean that all hope is lost. It could be that there are some simple rules why this is the case.
For example, there seem to be no cases of repeating sequences that cross a line break.
(I am sorry, but I writing from memory). In some special cases (I did some substitutions) there were such cases, but then both strings had the line break in the same place.
(I am not sure if I explained that clearly).

The bigram example is more tricky. If this were done by the author, it would have been a bad idea, because the decipherer would constantly lose track.
Here we would also have a typical case (=problem) that it makes the words very short, and it means that something else must be going on as well....