The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

f I'm following your write-ups correctly, you are also running the matching algorithm repeatedly with different crib sets. Transparently, I am not completely clear on the how and why.

Some fields of the SBJ recipes were apparently omitted by the author on all recipes.  Those are the "nature", "another name", and "provenance" fields, introduced by the keywords 味, 一名, and 生, respectively.  Usually the first is right after the entry title, and the other two are at the end of the entry; but when an entry is divided into sub-entries, they may occur at the beginning or end of a sub-entry.  

Anyway, those fields and their extents are trivially identified.  So I always delete them from the SBJ entry before looking for a match.

I also delete unconditionally some comments that would make no sense outside China (or even inside it). Like that note about the heads of chickens that were hung above the East Gate.

But some recipes, including Red Rooster, have some parts that just could have been omitted. In the Rooster recipe, these are the notes 女子 = "[for] women", 可作虎魄="[eggs] can be [alchemically] turned into amber", "神物" = "[amber] is a divine substance", and 鸡白蠹能肥脂 = "chicken white grubs can fatten fat".  Thus, I must try matching the recipe against the SPS parags with and without each of these items.  That is one component of the "variants" parameter in my program.

(It turns out that, in the case of the Rooster recipe, matching is impossible if 可作虎魄神物 and 鸡白蠹能肥脂 are both excluded or both included.  Thus the 16 possibilities reduce to 6: with just one of 可作虎魄, 可作虎魄神物,  or 鸡白蠹能肥脂, and with 女人 either included or excluded.  The three-way choice affects only the length of the gap after the last 主, and the best matchings by far are obtained with 可作虎魄.  The inclusion or exclusion of 女人 affects only the gap between the first and second 主, which is 21 hanzi long; the corresponding EVA gap is 3 letters to long if  女人 is excluded, 6 letters too short if it is included (compared to the expected ~110 letter).  So this choice is basically a meh.)

I am also trying to identify additional cribs.  At this point, the only two pairs I am fairly certain about are USES: 主 = daiin and QI: 气 = chedy, both with a small set of variant spellings or common typos.  So I typically rum my programs on some recipes with just USES, or just USES and QI, to identify the likely matching parags, and then run again with additional tentative cribs like 令 "makes", 血 "blood", 杀 "kill", 除 "eliminate", etc., hoping to identify their Voynichese equivalents.  These trials are a second component of the "variants" parameter.

(I am also considering deleting all qo from the SPS parags before testing for a match, justified by my hunch that this "digraph" is a symbol like "&" added by the Author.  Preliminary tests suggest that this generally improves the matching.)

All the best, --stolfi