Programmatically compute similarity between zodiacs

[Gioynich]

I am a little surprised to see an Arabic Al-Sufi ms among the top five overall best matches. That tradition includes systematic duplication of zodiac constellations (which are displayed in both the "from earth" and "from heaven" points of view): this results in a double cancer; but then cancer itself is the classical crab, rather than the Northern crayfish. I wonder why your method points out this source as particularly relevant: I can probably find answers in the archive you attached but I haven't tried yet. In the much simpler analysis I posted on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. in 2016, that ms was ranked 93 among the set of 130 zodiacs I considered.

Hi Marco,

Al-Sufi is interesting, because it gets very low scores for some signs (e.g. Aries and Gemini), but it ranks pretty high on other components, that is:

- Zodiac: 4th most similar (in a tie with other 5 manuscripts)
- Leo: 3rd (in a tie with other two manuscripts)
- Virgo: 6th
- Scorpio: 10th

The 'zodiac' component has just 4 attributes (number of signs per page, which sign starts the zodiac, presence of stars, and shape of the frames around the signs). Two attributes (number of signs per page and presence of stars) match.

For Leo:
- they both have their tongue out
- they are both not crouching
- they both have a front leg raised
- they both have a non-full mane (rare attribute, which means it boosts the similarity score)
   

For Virgo:
- they are both female
- they are both dressed
- they both have a star in their hand (sure, that's subjective, but it's a rare attribute)
- they are both not sitting or crouching (but I am not sure about the Voynich virgo)
   

For Scorpio, the only reason why they are considered pretty similar is the presence of stars (sure, in a completely different number and configuration), which is a rare attribute, so Al-Sufi's Scorpio doesn't rank as high as non-scorpions, but it ranks very high (if not the highest) among scorpions.