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Login to view. in its entirety. What I like about Donald's approach is that he seems to have a good sense of what questions are worth asking, for shedding maximum light on the VMs's creation. What is particularly striking to me, and what sets him apart from Torsten Timm and Gordon Rugg, is that Donald Fisk started his mathematical inquiry quite open to the possibility that the VMs text is meaningful, and has changed his mind entirely dispassionately, on the basis of the evidence he found. I could be wrong (they'll have to speak for themselves), but Timm and Schinner's and Hyde and Rugg's work both gave me the feeling of a fairly strong emotional investment in the VMs's text being meaningless. I've read nothing to indicate that any of the four researchers I just mentioned ever seriously entertained the possibility that the VMs's text was meaningful. Instead, this seemed to be their starting hypothesis, in both cases. There's nothing inherently wrong with this approach; I'm not sure most would admit it, but think most researchers in any field start with a clear idea of what result they're expecting and hoping for. Research grant underwriters certainly do this. Therefore, I find it considerably more compelling when a researcher starts out without any bias, or with a bias in the opposite direction, and then settles on a conclusion he was never expecting, based on his data. For example, last decade, prominent linguist Aleksandr Vovin set out to prove that Japanese and Korean are almost certainly related. When he parsed his data, he ended up concluding exactly the opposite: it was more consistent with Japanese and Korean not descending from a common ancestor. I found Prof Vovin's case convincing on the data alone, but I won't lie, the fact that he changed his mind based on the evidence added a good bit of credence to his case. I digress.
Not having a background in statistics, coding, or information science, Donald's methodology went a little over my head. Can anyone explain to a layman how to use his state tables to generate vords? I'm looking to try it out and brainstorm the types of simple, low-tech processes that a medieval person might have used, which would result in a set of state transition probabilities like he outlines. Also, if anyone can link me a good idiot's guide to understanding Markovian state transitions, that would be awesome.
I'd like to comment more on Donald's generation methodology, but I think I need to understand it better and try it out, before I've anything useful to offer.
I'm surprised Donald Fisk's work isn't better known and cited by advocates of the meaningless VMs hypothesis. Just from what I can see with my limited knowledge, he makes at least as strong a case for it as T&S or H&R, if not stronger.