@ Stolfi You gave yourself the title “Annoying Skeptic”—maybe it’s a little bit of karma that so many people are now such “annoying skeptics” of your theory. 
But this is all about “convincing” evidence.
And of course, your examples leave plenty of room for interpretation—I don’t need to tell you that; you said it yourself. I’d really be interested to know what you, as an annoying skeptic, would say about the theory if someone else presented it to you. It’s a shame we can’t find out.
1. For example, in the last example, there are 6 “daiin” and one “daiiin”—that is, 7 other matches—compared to only 3 matches. So what are the other “daiin”? Homophones?
2. The text also contains “qokaiin”—which, according to your interpretation = “and” “kaiin” - “kaiin” was also one of the options you listed. So there are actually 8 possibilities with 3 matches—so that’s not a good example!
3. “qokaiin” also appears right next to “daiin” in the top variant. In that case, there would even be 2 matches side by side, one has no correspondence.
Unfortunately, this reminds me too much of the mental overfitting seen in other solvers: errors are given low weight, while matches are heavily overweighted. These are exactly the things we so often criticize here—and that you yourself have criticized often enough. (But I actually think that we all suffer from this problem to a greater or lesser extent.)
I hope you understand my objection; it’s not an attack, but rather the things I’m wondering about.
But I'll just keep waiting for more evidence, because I can imagine what a lot of work that must be: an imprecise source text, not speaking the language, and then all the quirks of written Chinese compared to the spoken language—plus the unmanageable VMS with possibly (!) many omissions, and then the Chinese text, where a few paragraphs might still be missing —getting all of that to work together is certainly extremely time-consuming and an enormous amount of work—and if it’s in Chinese, then that’s a huge challenge. We should acknowledge that, too. Not an easy task!
All the best
Jost
But this is all about “convincing” evidence.
And of course, your examples leave plenty of room for interpretation—I don’t need to tell you that; you said it yourself. I’d really be interested to know what you, as an annoying skeptic, would say about the theory if someone else presented it to you. It’s a shame we can’t find out.
1. For example, in the last example, there are 6 “daiin” and one “daiiin”—that is, 7 other matches—compared to only 3 matches. So what are the other “daiin”? Homophones?
2. The text also contains “qokaiin”—which, according to your interpretation = “and” “kaiin” - “kaiin” was also one of the options you listed. So there are actually 8 possibilities with 3 matches—so that’s not a good example!
3. “qokaiin” also appears right next to “daiin” in the top variant. In that case, there would even be 2 matches side by side, one has no correspondence.
Unfortunately, this reminds me too much of the mental overfitting seen in other solvers: errors are given low weight, while matches are heavily overweighted. These are exactly the things we so often criticize here—and that you yourself have criticized often enough. (But I actually think that we all suffer from this problem to a greater or lesser extent.)
I hope you understand my objection; it’s not an attack, but rather the things I’m wondering about.
But I'll just keep waiting for more evidence, because I can imagine what a lot of work that must be: an imprecise source text, not speaking the language, and then all the quirks of written Chinese compared to the spoken language—plus the unmanageable VMS with possibly (!) many omissions, and then the Chinese text, where a few paragraphs might still be missing —getting all of that to work together is certainly extremely time-consuming and an enormous amount of work—and if it’s in Chinese, then that’s a huge challenge. We should acknowledge that, too.
Not an easy task!All the best
Jost
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