Anton > 10-04-2017, 08:20 PM
Quote:But in a century, no one has found any convincing evidence of meaningful information encoded in the text.
DonaldFisk > 10-04-2017, 09:16 PM
(10-04-2017, 08:20 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.OK, I guess I need to read your work in detail (which I haven't time to do yet).
Quote:But in a century, no one has found any convincing evidence of meaningful information encoded in the text.
That's not true. I won't mention the work by Montemurro & Zanette, because, as I noted, you suggest that you were able to reproduce the like results with the random text (however, if one works onwards from the pre-analyzed statistical properties of the text it might be trivial that s/he finds co-occurrences to sustain across the text). But, apart from that, there is quite a number of tiny indications. My favourite one is that two most frequent "Voynich stars" (labeled objects of f68r1 and f68r2) - otol and odaiin are both mentioned in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and both in the same paragraph. I wonder what would be the probability for that in a random meaningless text. Another one is that You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (the supposed Dracaena - a plant that was largely known in Europe by that time only by hearsay, since Europeans did not yet frequent the Canaries or the Socotra back then, in other words - definitely a rare plant from the perspective of the VMS author, if a European he be) is the only (!) botanical folio not containing any occurrence of a label vord.
There are also clear distribution shifts of some vords to certain sections - such as balneo or recipe. (I can only wonder why this fruitful field is largely unexplored still). Not sure if this would be a characteristic of a meaningless text generated by picking cards.
Davidsch > 11-04-2017, 11:04 AM
ReneZ > 12-04-2017, 07:13 AM
(10-04-2017, 08:20 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Quote:But in a century, no one has found any convincing evidence of meaningful information encoded in the text.
That's not true. I won't mention the work by Montemurro & Zanette, because, as I noted, you suggest that you were able to reproduce the like results with the random text (however, if one works onwards from the pre-analyzed statistical properties of the text it might be trivial that s/he finds co-occurrences to sustain across the text). But, apart from that, there is quite a number of tiny indications.
Anton > 12-04-2017, 12:11 PM
Quote:I would argue that the presence of "tiny indications" is not contradicting the absence of "convincing evidence".
ReneZ > 13-04-2017, 08:26 PM
(12-04-2017, 12:11 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Quote:I would argue that the presence of "tiny indications" is not contradicting the absence of "convincing evidence".
When they are considered together they begin to form evidence ex contrario.
Koen G > 13-04-2017, 08:35 PM
Anton > 13-04-2017, 10:03 PM
ReneZ > 14-04-2017, 11:35 AM
Davidsch > 14-04-2017, 12:28 PM
(13-04-2017, 08:35 PM)Koen Gh. Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The problem, in my opinion, is that it's impossible to prove that the text does not carry meaning. Even if someone writes a watertight program that mimics how a 15th century monk could have generated the text without losing too much time to the generating process itself (as is still a problem in this proposed solution), then still it is only shown that it could be meaningless.
Unless I'm mistaken, it could be proven that is has meaning, but it can never be proven that it doesn't.