Sam G > 20-02-2016, 06:07 PM
Emma May Smith > 20-02-2016, 06:43 PM
(20-02-2016, 10:52 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.(20-02-2016, 05:44 AM)-Job- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.De rhein een cepain faals mayneli oen the pelain.
In fact, this type of alternative and inconsistent spelling (though maybe not quite as adventurous) should probably be expected.
I wouldn't call it part of a cipher....
When I occasionally try to read German texts from 15th-16th Century books and MSs, they come across as something like the above, compared to modern German.
-Job- > 24-02-2016, 07:49 AM
(20-02-2016, 10:52 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.(20-02-2016, 05:44 AM)-Job- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.De rhein een cepain faals mayneli oen the pelain.
In fact, this type of alternative and inconsistent spelling (though maybe not quite as adventurous) should probably be expected.
I wouldn't call it part of a cipher....
When I occasionally try to read German texts from 15th-16th Century books and MSs, they come across as something like the above, compared to modern German.
-Job- > 24-02-2016, 09:18 AM
(20-02-2016, 06:07 PM)Sam G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.It's hard to see a sensible motive here. I guess you could argue that there doesn't necessarily have to be one, and that the creator of the VMS could have been foolish or insane (despite having apparently been one of the greatest cryptographers of all time). But when you combine the fact that the properties of the text itself are incompatible with any known type of cipher with the fact that many other subtle aspects of the VMS seem incompatible with a cryptological intention, it seems more reasonable to conclude that we're not looking at a ciphertext here. Especially since I don't see any convincing positive evidence for a ciphertext being presented.
ReneZ > 24-02-2016, 11:28 AM
Sam G > 24-02-2016, 03:20 PM
(24-02-2016, 09:18 AM)-Job- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.(20-02-2016, 06:07 PM)Sam G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.It's hard to see a sensible motive here. I guess you could argue that there doesn't necessarily have to be one, and that the creator of the VMS could have been foolish or insane (despite having apparently been one of the greatest cryptographers of all time). But when you combine the fact that the properties of the text itself are incompatible with any known type of cipher with the fact that many other subtle aspects of the VMS seem incompatible with a cryptological intention, it seems more reasonable to conclude that we're not looking at a ciphertext here. Especially since I don't see any convincing positive evidence for a ciphertext being presented.
You're mostly arguing for the general improbability of a cipher, in several cases using the logical fallacy of argument from incredulity.
Quote:Most VM theories may be depicted as improbable. For example, what's the probability that the VM contains an unreadable natural language which exhibits no clear association with any other known language?
Quote:Your premise that low entropy is only compatible with a verbose cipher is false, AFAIK. For example, null characters can also lower the character entropy depending on how they're employed.
Quote:Also, relating the VM's low character entropy with Japanese or Hawaiian without accounting for its other properties is comparable to classifying the VM as a verbose cipher without accounting for the word lengths.
Quote:Is there a language or cipher that matches all of Voynichese's features? I think that should be the focus of this discussion.
MarcoP > 24-02-2016, 05:41 PM
(20-02-2016, 06:07 PM)Sam G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.One of the most remarkable aspects of the VMS script is that it is designed to highlight and emphasize the structure of the text. This is completely contrary to the purpose of cryptography, which is to conceal any structure in the ciphertext in order to make it more difficult to crack.
....
And what about the VMS is even worth keeping secret? A bunch of information about herbs? A zodiac? Does that make any sense? Is there a known example of an encrypted herbal or an encrypted zodiac?
-Job- > 24-02-2016, 06:36 PM
(24-02-2016, 03:20 PM)Sam G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I am not using argument from incredulity. Attempting to understand the motives of the VMS creator from the decisions that he made is not fallacious, and it would seem to me that considering how a document such as the VMS is intended to be used would be pretty important to understanding what it is and why/how it was made. Actually I think it's a fairly standard thing to do with any document or even any artifact. I also note that you did not actually address any of the points I made.
Emma May Smith > 24-02-2016, 11:45 PM
(24-02-2016, 11:28 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Assuming that the author had a plain text, either in his head or in writing before him, and he somehow converted this to the Voynich MS text...
Then the low entropy either was already there in the plain text, or it is a result of his operation.
Looking at this operation, the random insertion of null characters is more likely to increase entropy, unless it wasn't really random but followed some pattern, in which case it isn't fundamentally different from a verbose cipher.
Compression algorithms (like the well-known 'zip') specifically increase the entropy, and the uncompression decreases it.
To decode the Voynich MS text, one is then looking for something similar to compression.
Removal of nulls would be a form of compression, and combining characters another.
Things I have seen in some translation attempts, e.g. suggestions that the gallows characters represent the Nahuatl character pair 'tl', are going into the wrong direction.....
Another suggestion: that the text is vowelless, and vowels need to be inserted, is equally going in the wrong direction. Such a further reduction of entropy would need to be balanced by 'something else' that stronly increases it.
ReneZ > 25-02-2016, 08:43 AM