The Cardan grille approach to the Voynich MS taken to the next level

[Anton]

About the wheels above, my thought on the surface is that why vords like afi , or even chofi, never happen.

(I still haven't had time to read the paper though)

[aStobbart]

So, following Julian's wheels, every first vord on the herbal section would be "fabricated" skipping the outer ring (leaving blank first character). If the author wanted to make meaningless text look meaningful, this is useful in the sense that you get a gallow as a first character and it gives the impresion label or title

[julian]

So, following Julian's wheels, every first vord on the herbal section would be "fabricated" skipping the outer ring (leaving blank first character). If the author wanted to make meaningless text look meaningful, this is useful in the sense that you get a gallow as a first character and it gives the impresion label or title

Yes, this would account for the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., right? 

The wheels are too flexible to be useful as they stand, I'm afraid.

[aStobbart]

So, following Julian's wheels, every first vord on the herbal section would be "fabricated" skipping the outer ring (leaving blank first character). If the author wanted to make meaningless text look meaningful, this is useful in the sense that you get a gallow as a first character and it gives the impresion label or title

Yes, this would account for the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., right? 

The wheels are too flexible to be useful as they stand, I'm afraid.

The idea of wheels geared together makes me think of an astrolabe and how it works (a mainframe with a rotating disk).

I read Rugg's paper back in 2006, I think it is time to give it a second read

[RenegadeHealer]

I suppose this may be simply a pictorial representation of Stolfi's grammar? It certainly doesn't get us any further, but I throw it in anyway. I am obsessed with the notion that a few cipher wheels were used to generate the text, perhaps geared together, and perhaps with cams that rotate adjacent wheels at certain positions :-)

This is sort of what I imagine when I ask myself the question, What simple machine has the right moving parts, designed to move either independently or dependent upon each other, with the right number of degrees of freedom, to produce an output with all the properties of the VMs text? Of course I'm using the term "machine" loosely; a computer code and an equation are machines, after all.

I'm currently working on a set of cypher wheels also, and will post when I finish with it. My goal is a machine where >95% of all vords occurring in the manuscript are a possible state of the machine, and >95% of possible states of the machine occur at least once as a vord in the manuscript (high sensitivity and specificity)

[Pardis Motiee]

The idea of wheels geared together makes me think of an astrolabe and how it works (a mainframe with a rotating disk).

I have been thinking of astrolabe since looking at zodiac signs and meanings, but I'm not sure if they could create structure of writings from that. Do you think it is possible?

[aStobbart]

The idea of wheels geared together makes me think of an astrolabe and how it works (a mainframe with a rotating disk).

I have been thinking of astrolabe since looking at zodiac signs and meanings, but I'm not sure if they could create structure of writings from that. Do you think it is possible?

Instead of wheels, you have a set of disks of different diammeters and these disk overlap one another. The outer wheel would be the disk with the larger diameter and so on. Then the machine has a default position, where you need to align the disks in a certain way in order to create Voynichese. Or maybe the operator can create his own version of Voynichise by rotating disks at his own will (from the "default position" rotate the outer disk 2 positions to the right, middle disk 3 pisitions to the left...)

The grille then would be an overlay that covers the entire machine and has three holes, one for each disk. That is what I had in mind.

Edit: Off course there would be several grilles with holes in different positions that the operator uses to create different words, once the machine is set to the desired position (Or maybe the same grille can rotate in fixed positions and thus a unique grill can be used to get many combinations,,,,).

Maybe the disks have blank spaces too, and these blank characters are used to mark the end/beggining. of a vord. Since the text is fabricated, spaces are meaningless. There could be cominations that get you 2 blank characters in a row, and this could mark the end of a paragraph...

[julian]

This is a set of wheels that cover ~93% of Currier A words, showing the example of qoteeody:



This is from a Genetic Algorithm that is seeking a set of up to 10 wheels that optimizes a) covering as many Currier A words as possible, b) using as few segment from each wheel as it can, c) having close to the same number of segments in each wheel.

[Koen G]

Why is something like "ii" in the last wheel?

[julian]

Why is something like "ii" in the last wheel?

The GA is given a set of glyphs and glyph sequences it can use as contents for each wheel segment: for this run I gave it the Stolfi core/crust/mantle set plus a couple of others like "in", "ii". Probably that "ii" would eventually get optimised away.

I don't want to derail this thread by injecting GA stuff, so will report further on it in my blog :-)