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This Famous Medieval Book May Be a Hoax
- This Famous Medieval Book May Be a Hoax
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RE: This Famous Medieval Book May Be a Hoax
nablator > 25-06-2025, 04:08 PM
(25-06-2025, 03:58 PM)Letieum Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I think this is a mistake: if you have a functional method for generating meaningless pseudo-language text, you can easily turn it into a fairly effective cyphering method.
Only if the method is deterministic, otherwise you have a one-way cipher. Technically the result is still a ciphertext, but effectively meaningless, even if you used meaningful information in the generation process, because the information is lost.
The self-citation method isn't deterministic. -
RE: This Famous Medieval Book May Be a Hoax
oshfdk > 25-06-2025, 04:33 PM
If I encode a character using the combination of the word length and the second character in the word (say, qOkedy is O-6 or S, cHedy is H-5 or A, oTey is T-4 or Y, pOchey is O-6 or S again), this is non-deterministic, but perfectly reversible. As a bonus this way will force me to use "combo characters" like g or m, that would count as two, near ends of the lines.
This method would promote self-citation, because it will be easy to reuse words.
There are hundreds of ways to make an encoding that on the surface would look compatible with Voynichese, I think. -
RE: This Famous Medieval Book May Be a Hoax
bi3mw > 25-06-2025, 04:42 PM
(24-06-2025, 07:06 AM)Torsten Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Binomial word-length distribution: Unlike the Poisson-like distribution typical of natural languages
The binomial word length distribution of a text generated with Torsten`s SelfCitationTextgenerator ( 34,980 words, 198,497 characters , comparable to VMS ). The result is better than expected, at least the basic structure is recognizable.
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RE: This Famous Medieval Book May Be a Hoax
nablator > 25-06-2025, 04:47 PM
(25-06-2025, 04:33 PM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.If I encode a character using the combination of the word length and the second character in the word (say, qOkedy is O-6 or S, cHedy is H-5 or A, oTey is T-4 or Y, pOchey is O-6 or S again), this is non-deterministic, but perfectly reversible.
You are right, but the method has to be at least partially deterministic: in your example the word length and the second character are not free.
Of course you can make any ciphering method less deterministic, for example by inserting an arbitrary number of random nulls.
In the case of the "self-citation" method, if the source of the "citation" (with modification) cannot be determined, there is no way to compare the source and the target and extract possibly meaningful information from the comparison. -
RE: This Famous Medieval Book May Be a Hoax
Letieum > 25-06-2025, 04:49 PM
(25-06-2025, 04:08 PM)nablator Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Only if the method is deterministic, otherwise you have a one-way cipher. ...
From what I understand, the self-referential method relies on selecting a previous word and choosing a modification to apply to that word.
The method isn't very clear about how these two choices are made, but, as mentioned in my previous message, the presence of a choice offers the possibility to encode meaning.
To avoid having a 'one-way cipher', it's sufficient for the reader to be able to determine the previous word used to form the current word, which simply requires framing the process of choosing the previous word -
RE: This Famous Medieval Book May Be a Hoax
nablator > 25-06-2025, 05:55 PM
Deleted.
I'll make a new thread.
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RE: This Famous Medieval Book May Be a Hoax
Mauro > 25-06-2025, 06:14 PM
(25-06-2025, 04:33 PM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.If I encode a character using the combination of the word length and the second character in the word (say, qOkedy is O-6 or S, cHedy is H-5 or A, oTey is T-4 or Y, pOchey is O-6 or S again), this is non-deterministic, but perfectly reversible.
Hmm sorry but I don't understand. It seems to me your encoding method is deterministic (no random numbers are involved) but non-reversible (is O-6 'qokedy' or 'qokain'?) -
RE: This Famous Medieval Book May Be a Hoax
Mauro > 25-06-2025, 06:27 PM
(25-06-2025, 04:49 PM)Letieum Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
(25-06-2025, 04:08 PM)nablator Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Only if the method is deterministic, otherwise you have a one-way cipher. ...
From what I understand, the self-referential method relies on selecting a previous word and choosing a modification to apply to that word.
The method isn't very clear about how these two choices are made,
The exact method used is in the source files of Torsten's program on GitHub (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) if you can read code. I just skimmed through them, what I can say is the choice of the type of modification is a random extraction with parametrized probabilities (comments after '//' are mine):
int combineSplitProbability = 10; // 10% probability to choose 'combine (rule #3)' or 'split' (more parameters should determine the ratio between combine and split)
int addRemoveProbability = 30; // 30% probability to choose to 'add' or 'remove' a glyph or a glyph string, which are defined with more parameters
int replaceProbability = 60; // 60% probability of replacing a glyph or glyph string (with additional parameters as above)
I did not analyze the code enough to be sure of how the choice of the word to copy is made, but I guess it's chosen randomly (I guess with an uniform distribution) from a sliding window of the text (ie.: from the list of the N preceding words).
I'm also not sure of how many total parameters there are, I'd say at sight 100-300? I think it's a rather low number (which is a good thing), but nonetheless the textual output compares rather well to the original Voynich (which is also a good thing, ofc). To give you an idea of the scale, I wrote a program which can generate a much better pseudoVoynich, but using a whopping ~8000 parameters, which are definetely too many. -
RE: This Famous Medieval Book May Be a Hoax
oshfdk > 25-06-2025, 06:49 PM
(25-06-2025, 06:14 PM)Mauro Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
(25-06-2025, 04:33 PM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.If I encode a character using the combination of the word length and the second character in the word (say, qOkedy is O-6 or S, cHedy is H-5 or A, oTey is T-4 or Y, pOchey is O-6 or S again), this is non-deterministic, but perfectly reversible.
Hmm sorry but I don't understand. It seems to me your encoding method is deterministic (no random numbers are involved) but non-reversible (is O-6 'qokedy' or 'qokain'?)
It's non deterministic because you can freely choose any word as long as the second letter is the one you need, and the whole word is of the required length. It's reversible, because the plaintext letter is uniquely determined by the word length and the second letter of the word.
(Just an example, has nothing to do with the Voynich MS, as far as I know.) -
RE: This Famous Medieval Book May Be a Hoax
nablator > 25-06-2025, 06:53 PM
(25-06-2025, 06:14 PM)Mauro Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Hmm sorry but I don't understand. It seems to me your encoding method is deterministic (no random numbers are involved) but non-reversible (is O-6 'qokedy' or 'qokain'?)
The way I understood it, O-6 would be ascribed to a unique letter (in a chart) so you could decipher Voynichese like this, not the other way around.