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Strong evidence of a structured four-phase system in the Voynich Manuscript

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  • [Article] Strong evidence of a structured four-phase system in the Voynich Manuscript
• Strong evidence of a structured four-phase system in the Voynich Manuscript

• RE: Strong evidence of a structured four-phase system in the Voynich Manuscript

  oshfdk > 27-04-2025, 09:31 PM

  I prefer giving people benefit of the doubt, so to me there is still possibility that this is a carefully designed and thorough attempt at identifying some structure in the MS, just with a few technical problems and somewhat badly explained too. But for this to be true, for the attempt to actually turn out thorough and well designed, the paper should greatly outperform the presentation given so far. So far I haven't seen anything that would make me curious enough to attempt replicating this beyond the first couple of steps. And normally I'm very curious about new Voynich theories and ideas. I think I was the first in this thread to actually run parts of the provided Python code and report on it, including running it with a different seed and comparing the results of the first model, and I immediately posted a few questions. I haven't got a single satisfactory answer from the topic starter to any of my questions, just some generic or contradictory replies which made no sense to me. Maybe it's a communication issue. I'll wait for the paper, but my hopes are not high.

• RE: Strong evidence of a structured four-phase system in the Voynich Manuscript

  Urtx13 > 27-04-2025, 11:20 PM

  (27-04-2025, 03:18 PM)nablator Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Two small issues in preprocess_eva_seed.py:
  
  1. It extracts at token_index = 0 the folio ID ($F) from the page header line:
  
  f1r,0,a,0
  ...
  f1v,0,a,0
  ...
  f2r,0,b,228
  ...
  f2v,0,b,228
  
  The test line.strip().startswith("<!") doesn't work because line includes the line header.
  
  
  2. It keeps comments between "<!" and ">" that should be skipped. For example:
  f1r,13,doodle,13
  
  Note: the removal of comments would also fix the page header issue because the page header is a comment. Something like this would work: line = line.remove(r"<!.*?>")
  
  
  For checking the stability of results you could try You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. the "reference" transliteration (no comments, no extended EVA). The Takeshi Takahashi transliteration is outdated (1999).

  
  Yes! I temporarily closed GitHub to make some updates. I have already fixed the preprocessing. I will post it here shortly.

• RE: Strong evidence of a structured four-phase system in the Voynich Manuscript

  Urtx13 > 28-04-2025, 12:00 PM

  Approaching the question from a new perspective has been highly enriching. It is always valuable to start from a dialectical process as the engine of scientific inquiry.
  
  Leaving behind the hypothesis of lunar phases, which might have involved a certain degree of arbitrariness, as Radio said, we have completely reformulated the analysis toward a model of thematic structure based on clustering pages, aiming to determine whether macroblocks exist. Also, we fixed the pre-processing code to clean EVA as Nab suggested. 
  
  By applying a systematic pipeline that combines thematic modeling (LDA, NMF), hierarchical clustering, and strict statistical validations (Random Forest, Permutation Test, Bootstrap, Hopkins Statistic), along with comparative controls using authentic and random texts, the results are pretty interesting.
  
  Without forcing any parameters, the pages of the Voynich Manuscript tend to cluster spontaneously into three large macroblocks, which notably coincide with the traditional divisions that have been proposed for a long time (Botany, Zodiac/Astronomy, Pharmacology, and Recipes). Each section has different repeated words. 
  
  The macroblocks are derived automatically from the page topic distributions (LDA) combined with hierarchical clustering, and are not manually imposed.
  
  These groupings do not appear in the control texts (a point I have taken into account very much following earlier discussions) or in synthetic random controls, and they disappear when the text is shuffled. This may support the hypothesis that there is a real and coherent internal structure within the Voynich Manuscript, likely of a thematic nature.
  
  I maintain that the existence of blocks that vanish when permutation or ablation tests are applied indicates a structured linguistic intention.
  
  As with any analytical process, errors are always possible, but that is the beauty of dialectical progress: advancing together as a community to explore new directions.
  
  I will share the complete pipeline shortly.

• RE: Strong evidence of a structured four-phase system in the Voynich Manuscript

  davidd > Yesterday, 02:32 PM

  Hi Urtx13,
  
  I only skimmed this thread but maybe you can address this question i have based on the code in the github:
  
  Is this summary correct:
  You seem to train a TF classifier model on the complete voynich, all folios, with some value added to each folio during training.
  Then you test the model and all the folios come back correctly identified by the classifier model.
  
  This is not how you normally test classifiers. Normally when you have limited example data, you remove part of the data from the training, and validate that your classifier trained on the other data is classifying the removed parts correctly. When you present a classifier with data it was trained on, it will give you the classification it was trained to produce. Maybe this process is hidden in one of the libraries you call, but i dont see it happen inside your code itself.
  
  Can you elaborate on this?

• RE: Strong evidence of a structured four-phase system in the Voynich Manuscript

  Urtx13 > Yesterday, 02:53 PM

  (Yesterday, 02:32 PM)davidd Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Hi Urtx13,
  
  I only skimmed this thread but maybe you can address this question i have based on the code in the github:
  
  Is this summary correct:
  You seem to train a TF classifier model on the complete voynich, all folios, with some value added to each folio during training.
  Then you test the model and all the folios come back correctly identified by the classifier model.
  
  This is not how you normally test classifiers. Normally when you have limited example data, you remove part of the data from the training, and validate that your classifier trained on the other data is classifying the removed parts correctly. When you present a classifier with data it was trained on, it will give you the classification it was trained to produce. Maybe this process is hidden in one of the libraries you call, but i dont see it happen inside your code itself.
  
  Can you elaborate on this?

  
  Yes, you are completely correct. That is why I am doing some changes to the code. Since the aim may differ a little bit I oponed another topic. Check it please!

• RE: Strong evidence of a structured four-phase system in the Voynich Manuscript

  Pepper > Yesterday, 04:40 PM

  I'm a maths ignoramus so finding it hard to follow the details of this theory, but I have a question - if the folios are not in their original order but have been reshuffled over the years,  does the cyclical pattern still hold up?

• RE: Strong evidence of a structured four-phase system in the Voynich Manuscript

  Urtx13 > 4 hours ago

  (Yesterday, 04:40 PM)Pepper Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I'm a maths ignoramus so finding it hard to follow the details of this theory, but I have a question - if the folios are not in their original order but have been reshuffled over the years,  does the cyclical pattern still hold up?

  
  No worries!
  
  When we shuffle the text, the pattern disappears. But when we analyze the original manuscript, the pattern re-emerges clearly. This suggests that the thematic structure follows an internal logic that withstands the physical disorder of the folios. So even if the current folio order is not original, the cyclical thematic structure still emerges robustly.
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