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An Essay on Entropy: what is it, and why is it so important?
- An Essay on Entropy: what is it, and why is it so important?
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RE: An Essay on Entropy: what is it, and why is it so important?
Bernd > 04-05-2022, 11:56 AM
I think the entropy of text rich in roman numerals would be extremely interesting. Surely there must be more books and letters dealing with accounting and financial transactions.
Another idea - have you tried to use coding languages like C, Java, Python for comparison?
Computer code has many voynichese-like properties like "words" and glyph combinations specific to line and paragraph position, repetitions and many similar expressions with slight differences. -
RE: An Essay on Entropy: what is it, and why is it so important?
MichelleL11 > 04-05-2022, 04:29 PM
(01-05-2022, 09:43 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.They would probably need to be transcribed first. RenegadeHealer, do you have a link to where you read about this?
Hi, Koen:
I'm going to jump in here with a link (and section of the blog post) for you. Blog post You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., specifically § 2, the paragraph that starts "In terms of precision . . ." (note the coincidence of the section abbreviation
) and the accompanying figure.
The example provided by Patrick may or may not be sufficiently long to test. Since he owns the manuscript maybe he would have an opinion about whether there are sufficient entries to be transcribed and analyzed. Do you have an estimation of how long of a text is needed to get decent entropy stats?
Michelle -
RE: An Essay on Entropy: what is it, and why is it so important?
ReneZ > 04-05-2022, 05:44 PM
(04-05-2022, 04:29 PM)MichelleL11 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Do you have an estimation of how long of a text is needed to get decent entropy stats?
This depends.
For H1, which is generally not too interesting, already 1000 characters give an indication.
For H2, which is the quantity most looked at for the Voynich MS, at least 10,000 would be needed.
It really depends on the rarer bigrams, for which, in a short text, there are just 0 or 1, but the real expectation is somewhere in between.
H3 is generally ignored, but this is where languages can be most easily separated. Even different authors in the same language. But it will require multiple 100,000's of characters to get a good estimate. -
RE: An Essay on Entropy: what is it, and why is it so important?
pfeaster > 05-05-2022, 04:06 PM
(04-05-2022, 04:29 PM)MichelleL11 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I'm going to jump in here with a link (and section of the blog post) for you. Blog post You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., specifically § 2, the paragraph that starts "In terms of precision . . ." (note the coincidence of the section abbreviation
) and the accompanying figure.
The example provided by Patrick may or may not be sufficiently long to test. Since he owns the manuscript maybe he would have an opinion about whether there are sufficient entries to be transcribed and analyzed.
I'm away from home at the moment, but as I recall, that particular manuscript is around a dozen pages long (although it was partially burned in a fire at some point and so is missing most of several lines at the top of each page). I don't think there's anything especially unusual about it, though, and I chose it as an example mainly because it seemed very ordinary.
That said, the point I was trying to make with it is a little different from the one now under discussion. I was reflecting on my sense of the "precision" of the writing in the VM -- how carefully and distinctly the individual characters seem to have been written. I'll admit that this is all very impressionistic on my part, and it's limited by the kinds of documents I'm used to looking at. But the VM writing seems more precise than typical handwritten linguistic text of the period (where someone who didn't understand the language would have a very difficult time preparing a transcription) and less precise than typical ciphertexts (which -- from what little experience I have with them -- seem mostly to be written as sequences of fairly discrete, disconnected, individually formed glyphs). It's in this sense that I thought the VM writing feels as though it has a similar rhythm to the contemporaneous writing of Roman numerals, somewhere between those two other extremes.
Of course that's not to say this couldn't reflect other similarities with Roman numerals besides, such as matters of entropy.
I'd be happy to transcribe the sums of money given in Roman numerals from that document (or others I have) if anyone wants to analyze them, but it might be just as easy to generate sums randomly and convert them into the same notation. Basically:
__ L __ s __ d
Where the second slot will never exceed 19 (because 20s=1L) and the third slot will never exceed 11 (because 12d=1s); where final [i] is written [j]; and where each unit is optional (a given sum might consist solely of L, s, or d, or any combination thereof). -
RE: An Essay on Entropy: what is it, and why is it so important?
RobGea > 17-05-2022, 06:09 PM
Noticed when doing some testing, thought this thread would be as good a place as any to put it.
'Green Eggs and Ham' by Dr.Seuss checked with nablators java code.
h0 = 4.459431618637297 :: h1 = 3.8063371795355936 :: h2 = 2.283586994311863 :: h2-h1 = 1.5227501852237304
Well within VMS range according to results in mbpaper by D.Stallings ( though the file size is a bit short -- 3238 chars ).