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Naibbe cipher paper
- Naibbe cipher paper
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RE: Naibbe cipher paper
Rafal > 28-11-2025, 01:51 PM
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RE: Naibbe cipher paper
magnesium > 28-11-2025, 05:26 PM
(28-11-2025, 01:51 PM)Rafal Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Thanks for the info. I am considering sending my own article about Rohonc Codex to Cryptologia so I am checking things out.
By the way they have really crazy prices. 56 Euro for an article from 1986 ?!
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
I think it's priced that way to strongly encourage subscriptions. 56 Euro for a single article...or ~180 Euro/year for unlimited access? -
RE: Naibbe cipher paper
N._N. > 28-11-2025, 08:58 PM
Prices for individual articles are mostly fictional because barely any academic actually pays for them thanks to bundles bought by research libraries (not to speak of the more grey areas or authors being allowed to send you copies, which is often the easiest way in smaller fields). You can often get a library card for less than that fee for one article and download all you want from all the journals the institution is subscribed to even if you don't have an university affiliation. In some cases you have to be on the premises of the library, in others, you can just sit at home and need some kind of login.
That being said, for publications on the Voynich manuscript, it is probably smart to a) choose a reputable journal to make sure your contribution does not get lost among the countless theories that are published online every day, which unfortunately usually means it is not a free open access journal and b) nevertheless ensure to keep it easily accessible to amateur researchers. In other words, great to see the article on the Naibbe cipher published! -
RE: Naibbe cipher paper
Jorge_Stolfi > 28-11-2025, 09:23 PM
(28-11-2025, 08:58 PM)N._N. Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.That being said, for publications on the Voynich manuscript, it is probably smart to a) choose a reputable journal to make sure your contribution does not get lost among the countless theories that are published online every day
Rafal, you must be careful to not mention the Voynich Manuscript, not even once. Then I suppose the Rohonc article would be fine for Cryptologia.
Jim Reeds too has experience publishing there. Maybe you should contact him?
All the best, --stolfi -
RE: Naibbe cipher paper
Rafal > 28-11-2025, 09:40 PM
Quote:That being said, for publications on the Voynich manuscript, it is probably smart to a) choose a reputable journal to make sure your contribution does not get lost among the countless theories that are published online every day,
Yes, the world changed a lot even for the last 25 years since I was a student myself.
There wasn't such thing as predatory journal ( You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. ) then. If someone published you then you had to be good. Today for money anybody may publish anything and even get citations from all around the world
But indeed nobody will care if you publish in some Turkish journal of dubious reputation ( see: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. )
But Cryptologia seems to have a good reputation. -
RE: Naibbe cipher paper
Skoove > Yesterday, 12:35 PM
Congratulations on publishing probably the most coherent paper I have seen from the Voynich community in a long time. I would just like to clarify a couple points based on my understand:
1. The tables that you use cannot produce standalone EVA 's', 'l' 'o' 'r' or 'd'? I saw that 'y' is a unigram option but none of the other common standalone single glyphs. Or is this accounted for by the type-1 and type-2 affixes?
2. You focus only on Voynich B, did you do many test on Voynich A as well? My personal opinion is that Voynich A (written by Scribe 1) is the most coherent and shows that Scribe 1 was the most famililar and/or professional of all the scribes with Voynichese. I tend to think that Voynich B would have more 'mistakes' or general inaccuracies compared to A.
3. Did you try languages other than latin? I'm not sure if the statistics of the results of a German text would be that different than a latin text but it would be interesting to see.
I'm glad that you have a section on the flaws of the cipher itself. I think that any statements of the Naibbe Cipher being too complex, are just being dismissive. Granted that if you were to overfit certain parameters just to meet the statistical properties you want then that would be too far. But if we are to achieve a cipher solution, it has to be significantly more complex than those that we have good historical evidence of from the time, otherwise we would have solved it already. -
RE: Naibbe cipher paper
Rafal > 4 hours ago
Magnesium, could I ask you a bit more details about writing articles for Cryptologia? I will make it public here because others possibly could find it useful too.
What are their expectations for your writing style?
- could you write in first person "I discovered..." or do they prefer personless forms "It was discovered..."?
- it it okay to give internet resources (blogs, forum posts, Wikipedia videos etc.) as your references or should it be scientific articles only?
- is it okay to refer to publications which aren't in English?
- is there any template for writing your biblography?
- do they accept just established facts or your hypotheses as well?
- any other useful hints?
And when you send it to them, did they just accept it or did they give you some feedback first - correct this and that ? -
RE: Naibbe cipher paper
magnesium > 2 hours ago
(Yesterday, 12:35 PM)Skoove Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Congratulations on publishing probably the most coherent paper I have seen from the Voynich community in a long time.
Thanks! I'll take your questions one by one:
Quote:1. The tables that you use cannot produce standalone EVA 's', 'l' 'o' 'r' or 'd'? I saw that 'y' is a unigram option but none of the other common standalone single glyphs. Or is this accounted for by the type-1 and type-2 affixes?
Correct. This decision was in part a product of wanting as much structural similarity as possible among the unigram word types, as a proof of concept. But at least some of these standalone glyphs are valid bigram prefixes or suffixes. I don't talk about it explicitly in the paper, but a scribe could write a standalone bigram prefix or suffix in lieu of a unigram word type. While it would disobey the formal rules of the cipher, this solo prefix/suffix would also be decipherable (albeit potentially ambiguous). For example, <s> is one of the bigram prefixes within the Naibbe cipher that stands for M.
Quote:2. You focus only on Voynich B, did you do many test on Voynich A as well? My personal opinion is that Voynich A (written by Scribe 1) is the most coherent and shows that Scribe 1 was the most famililar and/or professional of all the scribes with Voynichese. I tend to think that Voynich B would have more 'mistakes' or general inaccuracies compared to A.
I focused on Voynich B for two reasons. For one, there's simply more of Voynich B than Voynich A, and I wanted as much data as possible. Second, the unusual proportional frequency-rank distribution of Voynich B, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., is what specifically inspired some of the modeling that resulted in the Naibbe cipher. I agree that Scribe 1 knew their way around the script; they're the one who's most likely to do a complex ligature that connects two adjacent tokens, for example.
Quote:3. Did you try languages other than latin? I'm not sure if the statistics of the results of a German text would be that different than a latin text but it would be interesting to see.
Yes, I did. In some initial modeling work (described in Supplementary Material 3), I found that the cipher happened to work especially well with Latin and Italian. But the cipher totally can be applied to other languages, as well. I know of at least one use of the cipher to encrypt German, as a demo of the (very cool!) Python library pykeedy: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Quote:I'm glad that you have a section on the flaws of the cipher itself. I think that any statements of the Naibbe Cipher being too complex, are just being dismissive. Granted that if you were to overfit certain parameters just to meet the statistical properties you want then that would be too far. But if we are to achieve a cipher solution, it has to be significantly more complex than those that we have good historical evidence of from the time, otherwise we would have solved it already.
I agree: Statistically, the VMS is inconsistent with well-characterized historical ciphers from the period. So if it's a cipher—and it may not be!—then we should be open to a cipher structure that's unusual or undocumented. That said, any such cipher has to be historically plausible: doable by hand with 15th-century materials and broadly in line with the era's cryptographic principles. The Naibbe cipher can be seen as an extreme elaboration of some of the design principles of the diplomatic homophonic ciphers used in 15th-century northern Italy. Again, that doesn't mean the Naibbe cipher literally existed at the time, but it's not as if I need some anachronistic clockwork gizmo to make the cipher work. -
RE: Naibbe cipher paper
Jorge_Stolfi > 1 hour ago
(4 hours ago)Rafal Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.?
I believe Cryptologia is a typical academic journal, so my experience elsewhere may be useful:
- could you write in first person "I discovered..." or do they prefer personless forms "It was discovered..."?
The "I discovered" is unusual and makes the article seem like it is more about the author than about the topic. Thus passive voice is the norm.
(I recall a non-technical writing expert complaining that tech articles make it seem that labs are deserted places where the instruments operate themselves, chemicals mix on their own, etc.)
If you must refer to yourself, use the majestic plural "we discovered", even if you are the only author.
But, more importantly, the article should not spend any words telling how you reached the conclusions, much less your failed attempts. It should state only the conclusions and the evidence that supports them. The article should describe only procedures, like statistical tests, that do work, and that others can use to confirm the conclusions; not what you actually did to reach them.
YES: "The ruins can be reached by cable car from the village of Al-Kaputt in the valley below."
NO: "The locals told us that there were ruins at the top of the mountain. It took us three days to climb the North slope (not counting one day wasted because we read the map upside-down), during which we sprained our ankle and ran out of food, only to find, when we finally reached the top, that there was a cable car reaching there from the village Al-Kaputt in the valley below."
- It it okay to give internet resources (blogs, forum posts, Wikipedia videos etc.) as your references?
Generally not, except for repositories where you make available additional data or programs that readers may need to check or use the paper. Or to give credit to someone else who came up with a key idea. Or to a digital repository in a respectable institution, like digital scans and transcriptions served by a museum, state archive, university, etc..
Otherwise the references should be only to scientific articles published in journals, books, or at least proceedings of conferences.
- is it okay to refer to publications which aren't in English?
Yes, no problem there.
- is there any template for writing your bibliography?
If the journal requires one, just look at a few examples in that same journal. As long as it is serious and of reasonable size, the journal will not care about what is in it.
- do they accept just established facts or your hypotheses as well?
The paper must contain at least some claims that have substantial evidence. Given that, it is OK to add a few conjectures which would need further work to prove or disprove. They usually go at the end of the article, at the end of the "Conclusions" section. But of course you should distinguish them from the conclusions: "Several symbols remain to be deciphered or confirmed. In particular, we conjecture that the symbol {\spac} may represent an alien spaceship, based on its shape and the tiny human figure that appears to be being sucked up into it by a powerful beam."
Hope it helps, --stolfi - could you write in first person "I discovered..." or do they prefer personless forms "It was discovered..."?