[Blog Post] Spatial Spread And Conditional Character Entropy Reduction

[MichelleL11]

Those who explore the "hoax" hypothesis judge that Voynichese is not a flow of language. I think that maybe Voynichese is not a flow of language instead.

Hi, Anton:

Thanks for this blog post.  It was quite interesting and I appreciate the time and effort it takes to put abstract ideas like this to the test.

When I try to think about what the Voynich cipher could be, I am constantly reminded of the statement by Leon Battista Alberti in his You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. that the structure of "letters, syllables, and words . . . and phrases" can be scrambled "so that to an outsider the words appear like the leaves of a tree blown about by the wind that have been raked into a pile and set there."

Although this publication is a bit late for the VM, it necessarily discusses ideas that are in existence and thus could conceivably be discussing cipher approaches that form a basis within the manuscript.  It certainly describes something well different than ordinary substitution ciphers.  I do wish he had provided more concrete examples (the single provided example is internally contradictory and discusses moving individual letters around in a pattern that superficially seems it would not alter entropy).  Or perhaps if some other examples of such scrambling could be found within other writing than the VM -- but the search goes on.

To me, this is a good example of something that could be described in this way.  I look forward to the directions you take this type of investigation.