06-01-2026, 07:39 PM
(06-01-2026, 05:22 PM)nablator wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.There is a trade-off between reducing the number of possible follow-up characters because of the smaller character set and increasing the number of follow-up characters by merging the possibilities of several polyphones. (It's not the number of possibilities, it's their frequencies that matter actually.)
Reducing the character set decreases h0 = log2(number of characters) and then you have always h0 >= h1 >= h2 so making h0 low enough will force h2 as low as you want. But then you are no longer compatible with Voynichese, that uses ~20 characters.
How certain are we that voynichese really, genuinely uses ~20 seperate characters representing ~20 seperate letters, as opposed to 8 or 9 types of symbol? For example:
would effectively mean that each voynichese symbol maps to an intermediary symbol/square, as opposed to each meaning something different. The author themselves then chooses which of the symbols in the group to choose based on personal preference, a predetermined ruleset or both.
When decoding, it may have been effectively like saying "is it a tall bench looking one" or "is it a bunch of C's together" as opposed to each variation meaning something different.