Deconstructing the VMS : A positionless ledger (part 1)

[Dunsel]

How is this different from a slot grammar? If treated as a slot grammar, how does this ledger score against the existing slot grammars in Mauro's metric? Most likely this question is about the full version of the ledger with gallows, etc, because the metric measures the efficiency in reconstructing the full text, which requires a nearly 100% coverage.

Ok, couldn't sleep last nite so I dug into your question. I was vaguely aware of Mauro's work but hadn't really examined it.  So here's some preliminary results as I understand his work:

This ledger is basically a conditional slot grammar rather than a conventional slot grammar: the the next letter in a word depends on the glyph immediately before it. I had to force it into a finite slot-style implementation so that Mauro's coverage/efficiency metric could be applied. 

With gallows retained it covered 100% of the 8,424 RF1a-n types tested (the transcription Maro used) and generated about 7.82 billion possible forms, giving an efficiency of 1.08×10⁻⁶. For comparison, Mauro's EXTENDED-12 covers 88.45% while generating 6.12 billion forms, with efficiency 1.16×10⁻⁶. So the two have almost identical efficiency, but the ledger reaches full coverage. 

Stripping gallows (which I will explain my reasonings for this in the next post) makes a huge difference. The ledger still gives 100% coverage of the stripped vocabulary, but the generated space falls from 7.82 billion to about 337 million. Efficiency improves about 15-fold, to 1.65×10⁻⁵. Mauro’s EXTENDED-12 is 1.16×10⁻⁶ at 88.45% coverage.

So the stripped ledger has full coverage and roughly 14 times Mauro’s efficiency.

In my work, I use the Takahashi and the Zandbergen/Landini transcriptions.  Like Mauro's work, I remove any word that contains a splat and I did the same for the RF1a transcription just so I could compare apples to apples.

Disclaimer:  To answer your question rather quickly, ChatGPT was used to read Mauro's methodology and PDF and create a set of instructions for Codex to clean the RF1a transcription and produce the python code to run the test.  I couldn't find any code repository for Mauro.  And yes, I will be creating a repository which I'll link in the final post to all of this.