23-07-2016, 06:08 PM
Hi all,
So, for quite a while I've wondered why Torsten Timm's auto-copying hypothesis hasn't made a bigger splash in the Voynich community.
Perhaps it would give the community more confidence in the auto-copying hypothesis if it could be statistically (not just subjectively) shown that the average edit distance between words in the VMS is anomalously low compared to other texts.
In theory, it should be possible for someone with more computer programming experience than myself to calculate, using certain pre-determined rules about how to calculate edit-distances:
1. The edit-distance between any two successive words. Then, display both a color-scale-coded, zoomed-out map of the VMS according to successive word edit distances (where red=1, orange=2, etc), along with the overall average successive word edit-distance in the VMS, and compare these with standard texts from other languages.
2. The average edit distance between any particular VMS "word" and all other words in the VMS, weighted according to the frequency of those other words (so, a word that is used twice as often will have its edit-distance count for twice as much as that of a different word only used half as often).
3. The average of this average. Compare with other standard texts, etc.
4. The average edit-distance between all two-word combinations (not just successively) on any particular page, weighted by the word frequencies. Compare with other standard texts, etc.
I predict that, if someone were to do these sorts of computational attacks on the VMS and other standard texts, one would find stark contrasts. The VMS has no two-word combinations like "throughout" vs. "swimming," to pick two random English words. In the VMS, if you had the word "throughout," you'd find plenty of words like "thrughut" or "trough" or "rouge" or "hotrug" but no word like "swimming" that is based on an entirely different word stem (aside from the other two word stems one would find in the VMS, if you were starting with "chedy." Yes, there are words like "ol" and "aiin," but no words like "nemrie" that are unassociated with any of those stems).
Natural languages don't work like this. This computational attack would settle, once and for all, that the VMS must either be a constructed language, a cipher, or gibberish.
So, for quite a while I've wondered why Torsten Timm's auto-copying hypothesis hasn't made a bigger splash in the Voynich community.
Perhaps it would give the community more confidence in the auto-copying hypothesis if it could be statistically (not just subjectively) shown that the average edit distance between words in the VMS is anomalously low compared to other texts.
In theory, it should be possible for someone with more computer programming experience than myself to calculate, using certain pre-determined rules about how to calculate edit-distances:
1. The edit-distance between any two successive words. Then, display both a color-scale-coded, zoomed-out map of the VMS according to successive word edit distances (where red=1, orange=2, etc), along with the overall average successive word edit-distance in the VMS, and compare these with standard texts from other languages.
2. The average edit distance between any particular VMS "word" and all other words in the VMS, weighted according to the frequency of those other words (so, a word that is used twice as often will have its edit-distance count for twice as much as that of a different word only used half as often).
3. The average of this average. Compare with other standard texts, etc.
4. The average edit-distance between all two-word combinations (not just successively) on any particular page, weighted by the word frequencies. Compare with other standard texts, etc.
I predict that, if someone were to do these sorts of computational attacks on the VMS and other standard texts, one would find stark contrasts. The VMS has no two-word combinations like "throughout" vs. "swimming," to pick two random English words. In the VMS, if you had the word "throughout," you'd find plenty of words like "thrughut" or "trough" or "rouge" or "hotrug" but no word like "swimming" that is based on an entirely different word stem (aside from the other two word stems one would find in the VMS, if you were starting with "chedy." Yes, there are words like "ol" and "aiin," but no words like "nemrie" that are unassociated with any of those stems).
Natural languages don't work like this. This computational attack would settle, once and for all, that the VMS must either be a constructed language, a cipher, or gibberish.