23-07-2016, 08:08 PM
Quote: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.
I think that is mainly because Torsten's hypothesis implies that the whole stuff is meaningless, while there are many tiny obstacles to the meaninglessness of the text. To name my favourite one:
otol and odaiin are the two most frequent "Voynich stars" (labeled objects in f68r1 and f68r2), and they are both mentioned in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (supposed to serve for some introduction or summary).
Quote:That the VMS is not encrypted is basically proven by the low second-order entropy of the text, since virtually all ciphers increase entropy. The main exception, verbose ciphering, is ruled out by the lack of repeated strings (no long words and no repeated sequences of short words).
Is the fact that all ciphers increase entropy mathematically proven? I think it is not. So there are no foundations to state that. One may state that "all ciphers known to this person increase entropy", but that would not disprove the hypothesis that VMS is enciphered since it well may be enciphered by a cipher unknown (indeed, if it were enciphered with a known cipher, it would have probably been deciphered long ago).
So it is by no means "proven" that VMS is not a cipher.
For the verbose ciphering, is it ruled out? What if it is supplemented by shuffling?