Glyph counts between Gallows

[julian]

Hi Julian. I wasn't involved with the VMs when you were last active, but I've read your whole blog through a couple of times and am a big fan of your work. Let's just say I have a very good feeling about that recent paper by Rene Zandbergen. I'm not much one for cargo cults, but it seems like this paper is attracting a number of serious veteran VMs researchers back to the discussion table. I'm half expecting Prof Jorge Stolfi to show up and comment on it. If he does, I'd feel comfortable saying a breakthrough is not far away.

I lied. I love a good cargo cult. If everybody could help me out by saying his name in their comments, it makes the mojo stronger, and he's more likely to find this thread and show up, by the power of SEO. 

(Interesting analysis clipped)

Another area for improvement is to exclude Grove words from all the counts. I don't think the gallows that make Grove words have anything to do with the gallows that occur anywhere else in the manuscript.

Hi RenegadeHealer,

Thanks for this very interesting reply, and for mentioning STOLFI! 

As mentioned in a comment to Emma on the blog, the motivation for looking at counts of intervening glyphs between gallows was the pipe-dream that the gallows' appearances are somehow connected to the positions of a cipher wheel as it is rotated to encode a new plaintext word. So, Rene's arXiv paper about Rugg's grilles and cipher wheels resonates strongly with me - it's very exciting! 

Emma also suggested removing Grove words (this refers to words which begin with a gallows glyph and are at the start of a page, and which were first identified as curious by a guy called Grove, if I'm not mistaken?).

It may be that the gallows glyphs in the Grove words are related to (or maybe even define) the starting position(s) of the cipher wheel(s) that are going to be used for encoding that folio.

Rene has shown that the grille/wheel method, with carefully positioned glyphs on the wheel, can produce VMS words that look right i.e. have the construction identified by Stolfi. The big question in my mind is how the apparatus would actually be used to cipher a Latin plaintext :-)