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Speculative fraud hypothesis
- Speculative fraud hypothesis
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RE: Speculative fraud hypothesis
Jorge_Stolfi > 25-08-2025, 08:30 PM
If the "copy" and "modify" parts of the algorithm are turned off, leaving only a "generate from scratch" step, it reduces to a Markov chain of order zero -- that just outputs words from a fixed probability distribution, without regard for previous outputs.
With the right "generate" algorithm, such a generator can reproduce some statistical properties of the VMS text, such as Zipf law, per-word word entropy, word structure, and glyph and glyph pair distributions, But it cannot produce any word-pair distribution other than (random first word) x (random second word). That is, the next-word entropy would be the same as the plain word entropy.
As I wrote earlier, even with a significant copy probability, the word-pair distribution should gradually tend to this state; since each time the source pointer is reset another random word pair would be added to the repertoire of pairs available for subsequent copying. -
RE: Speculative fraud hypothesis
dashstofsk > 25-08-2025, 08:45 PM
(25-08-2025, 01:45 PM)magnesium Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.interesting to sweep across a wider parameter space for this generator: randomly iterate the code’s various threshold parameters, sweep across a wide range of initializing lines
It seems to me unlikely that any tinkering with the algorithm will lead to any leap in understanding of the manuscript. If you read Torsten Timm's papers you will read that his 'simple process for random text generation' just reproduces 'the key statistical properties' of the language of the manuscript. There is no claim that his method can truly reproduce the text of the manuscript. -
RE: Speculative fraud hypothesis
asteckley > 25-08-2025, 09:09 PM
(25-08-2025, 08:45 PM)dashstofsk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.It seems to me unlikely that any tinkering with the algorithm will lead to any leap in understanding of the manuscript. If you read Torsten Timm's papers you will read that his 'simple process for random text generation' just reproduces 'the key statistical properties' of the language of the manuscript. There is no claim that his method can truly reproduce the text of the manuscript.
Ah good. Someone finally noticed that. -
RE: Speculative fraud hypothesis
ReneZ > 26-08-2025, 12:16 AM
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RE: Speculative fraud hypothesis
Torsten > 27-08-2025, 03:33 PM
(24-08-2025, 08:46 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
(23-08-2025, 08:23 PM)Torsten Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.There was no need to invent an artificial “gibberish generation” mechanism. As D’Imperio already observed [...]
She was not stating a fact. She was proposing her version of the "hoax" theory. Which, in general terms, apparently is the same as yours. Which has the same problems as yours.
Actually, D’Imperio specifically described the practice of concealing an encrypted message within a longer dummy text. In doing so, she noted that scribes confronted with such a task would typically generate meaningless text by repeating parts of neighboring strings with various small changes.
This is what D'Imperio wrote (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.):
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RE: Speculative fraud hypothesis
Torsten > 27-08-2025, 08:02 PM
(24-08-2025, 08:46 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Torsten Wrote:Consequently, a scribe attempting to generate language-like gibberish would, sooner or later, abandon the laborious task of perpetual invention in favor of the far easier strategy of reduplicating and adapting previously written material — and would ultimately adhere to this approach consistently.
Note my emphasis. The problem is that the "adapting" is far from a simple step. Voynichese words have a very restricted structure, so the "adapting" must be random but such that it preserves that structure. At this point the gibberish generation method is not much easier than generating each word from scratch (as Rugg had proposed), and is totally not "natural".
The modifications in question are not random, nor do they disrupt the underlying word structure. Instead, they follow systematic patterns—most commonly the substitution of one or more glyphs with similar ones. For example, it is considerably easier for a scribe to transform chaiin into shaiin, or daiin into dain, than to invent entirely new word forms from scratch. This process preserves structural consistency while naturally generating the kinds of variation observed in the Voynich text.
Additionally, for a text created by self-citation it appears as a logical assumption that the scribe also used aesthetically motivated design rules for glyph selection, in order to harmonize the overall appearance of the text (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., p. 10).
(24-08-2025, 08:46 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.In fact (if I read you correctly), your justification for your proposed method is that it creates the repetitiousness that you claim to see in the VMS; which is a clue that the text is gibberish. Wouldn't the Author have worried about this last fact?
Paraphrasing your argument: "The VMS text has statistical properties X, Y, and Z, where Z is 'repetitiousnss'. Here is an algorithm that generates gibberish with properties X, Y and Z. Therefore the VMS must be gibberish."
That is not an accurate representation of my argument. I would kindly ask you to refer directly to my published papers rather than speculate about my position, as they set out the hypothesis and its justification in detail.
(24-08-2025, 08:46 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.How could a "parameterless" Mutate function produce these asymmetric word frequencies?
My hypothesis is directly grounded in the observed word frequencies of Voynichese. The so-called “parameterless” aspect of the self-citation method does not ignore these asymmetries; rather, it seeks to explain them as natural outcomes of the iterative copying and modification process itself, without the need for externally imposed parameters.
See for instance You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., p. 6:
Quote:The respective frequency counts confirm the general principle: high-frequency tokens also tend to have high numbers of similar words. This is illustrated in greater detail in Figure 3: "isolated" words (i.e. unconnected nodes in the graph) usually appear just once in the entire VMS while the most frequent token <daiin> (836 occurrences) has 36 counterparts with edit distance 1. Note that most of these "isolated" words can be seen as concatenations of more frequent words (e.g. <polcheolkain>=<pol>+<cheol>+<kain>). This characteristic dependence of token frequency from word similarity is just another manifestation of the long-range correlations that have been uncovered and discussed by several researchers throughout the last decade.