degaskell > 10-01-2023, 10:45 PM
Koen G > 10-01-2023, 11:14 PM
bi3mw > 10-01-2023, 11:25 PM
(10-01-2023, 10:45 PM)degaskell Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.When we actually sit real humans down and say "write me something that looks meaningful but isn't" - even people without much background in linguistics or the Voynich manuscript - we end up with an explosion of different texts and approaches, many of which are surprisingly non-random.That many texts are not random is a psychological phenomenon. People are geared to find meaning, even where there is obviously none (or none should exist). So I'm not surprised that many experimentees have to fail in the task of creating completely meaningless text in the end. It would be interesting to compare the "systems" developed "on the fly" with each other to check whether, and if so in which form, there are similarities. For this purpose, one can of course interview the experimentees.
degaskell > 11-01-2023, 12:47 AM
(10-01-2023, 11:25 PM)bi3mw Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.People are geared to find meaning, even where there is obviously none (or none should exist). So I'm not surprised that many experimentees have to fail in the task of creating completely meaningless text in the end.I find the phrase "fail in the task of creating completely meaningless text" fascinating, because from my perspective, the participants didn't fail at all. They wrote text that had no recoverable linguistic meaning, but that did not necessarily mean that it was random, just that any nonrandomness it exhibited did not encode linguistic meaning. Consider the texts "jqvdy fls mcbdkpfkrfbak zzaa", "quodliar sae cauerliar foenibecc", and "the mome raths outgrabe." The first two are equally linguistically meaningless, but differ in randomness; the third is linguistically meaningful, but appears to be nonsense until explained. I think this highlights the distinction between being mathematically random (which the Voynich clearly is not) and being linguistically random (which the Voynich may still be).
(10-01-2023, 11:25 PM)bi3mw Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.It would be interesting to compare the "systems" developed "on the fly" with each other to check whether, and if so in which form, there are similarities. For this purpose, one can of course interview the experimentees.For background, we collected these data several years ago, and one of my main regrets was not designing in a more comprehensive post-exercise questionnaire for the participants. We did interview them, but analyzing the data raised a lot more questions I wished we had asked!
Wladimir D > 11-01-2023, 06:04 AM
Koen G > 11-01-2023, 10:18 AM
nablator > 11-01-2023, 10:53 AM
(11-01-2023, 10:18 AM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.This would change the assignment from "come up with anything you want" to "come up with something within these constraints".Who knows how many constraints the writers of the VM had and how they were implemented... some are very consistent and some seemed to change (variable "settings" or "preferences" creating "dialects" at different scales: paragraph, page, bifolio, and larger). Any gibberish generated without the same evolving constraints will not be statistically comparable.
Hider > 11-01-2023, 11:53 AM
(10-01-2023, 10:45 PM)degaskell Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.But again, if this is true, how might we more rigorously test if the text is meaningful or not? I think one major outstanding gap is in our understanding of how small-scale characteristics of gibberish might propagate over larger-scale documents like the Voynich, but there are undoubtedly others as well. We suggest in the paper that computer simulations might be one way to approach this, but I'm very interested to hear other ideas.Information makes sense only when a person knows what to do with it, how to apply it. In cases where a person does not understand the meaning of this information, it becomes completely useless to him.
Aga Tentakulus > 11-01-2023, 02:17 PM
bi3mw > 11-01-2023, 02:31 PM
Quote:Volunteers were given an instruction sheet telling them to “create a ‘document’ by filling three pages with fake, meaningless text in a ‘language’ that you make up as you go. Ideally, this ‘language’ should not actually mean anything, but should appear realistic enough that most observers would not be able to distinguish it from a real language they simply did not know.