Hypervector Analysis of the Voynich Manuscript

[Alin_J]

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Wanted to share this reference with the group.  It is cited in the Kanerva lecture slide deck linked to Darrin’s fuller discussion.

If I am reading this correctly, a hypervector built from some trigrams statistics will only match well (small cosine distance) other vectors built from similar trigrams statistics (for the same trigrams). This will not work at all with an arbitrary choice of letters to represent a language (i.e. a permutation of the alphabet or simple substitution of another alphabet). For Voynichese, no one is arguing that EVA (or CUVA etc.) matches the actual letters that the writer had in mind (if any). Every natural language theorist uses a different mapping.

Yes, this is exactly the point I (and Marco) earlier tried to make clear in this thread.

Darrin,

Another thing that for the moment worries me in the description of methodology (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) is the assumption of these particular vectors fulfilling the requirement of angle close to 90 deg (cos(angle) = ~0) for two different random vectors. In order for this to be true, the dot product of the two vectors must be near 0. The only way I can see for these to accomplish that is if the mean vector component value of at least one of the random vectors is 0. Therefore, two random vectors composed of random 0 or 1 will not work because their mean component value will then be approx. 0.5 if they are truly random. The dot product of the two vectors will be 0.25 times the number of components (dimensions) according to my calculations (resulting in a lower angle, around 60 degrees).
However, random vectors composed of either -1 or 1 randomly will work (each random vector component centered around 0 with equal distance). Perhaps this is what is meant?