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The Voynich Manuscript’s positional entropy collapse
- The Voynich Manuscript’s positional entropy collapse
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RE: The Voynich Manuscript’s positional entropy collapse
Torsten > 10-09-2026, 07:37 AM
(10-09-2026, 07:26 AM)Dunsel Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....
I explicitly wrote that I was not addressing the methodology or conclusions and that I may come back to it. A reference check is standard scholarly practice. I did the same for Layfield and Davis 2026 and posted the results on Zenodo. -
RE: The Voynich Manuscript’s positional entropy collapse
DG97EEB > 10-09-2026, 07:55 AM
Sorry Torsten, I'm with Rod on this one. You have an unfortunate habit of coming on here and ripping apart others' work. Peer review is an essential part of the scientific method, but I must say I find your approach to it rather unsporting, and one of the reasons why some find this forum so unwelcoming. Besides which Rod and lisa have been through extensive peer review before being published. It's not a perfect system and a lot of rubbish does get through, we know that, but I rarely see anything constructive that doesn't involve your own work. -
RE: The Voynich Manuscript’s positional entropy collapse
Torsten > 10-09-2026, 08:16 AM
(10-09-2026, 07:55 AM)DG97EEB Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Peer review is an essential part of the scientific method, but I must say I find your approach to it rather unsporting, and one of the reasons why some find this forum so unwelcoming.
A published peer-reviewed paper in Cryptologia is held to a different standard than a forum post. It has a DOI, it enters the permanent record, and it will be cited by future researchers. A phantom citation as the opening empirical claim and three sources cited for claims they don't support are not matters of style or sportsmanship — they are factual errors in the scholarly record. -
RE: The Voynich Manuscript’s positional entropy collapse
MarcoP > 10-09-2026, 08:28 AM
(10-09-2026, 07:55 AM)DG97EEB Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Sorry Torsten, I'm with Rod on this one. You have an unfortunate habit of coming on here and ripping apart others' work.
I think we should focus on the content of the paper. Ad personam comments about Torsten's style may be understandable (I do understand them), but they do not address the point. Are the references in the paper correct? In these LLM days, incorrect references are particularly troubling of course.... -
RE: The Voynich Manuscript’s positional entropy collapse
Antonio García Jiménez > 10-09-2026, 08:58 AM
Hey Rod, don't pay attention to what Torsten says. He, like others, works with a truncated version of the Voynich. He's only interested in the script; for him, the imagery doesn't exist. Who came up with the idea of including so many drawings? -
RE: The Voynich Manuscript’s positional entropy collapse
Bernd > 10-09-2026, 09:02 AM
Ripping apart others' works is one of the most fundamental aspects of academic research. There's a reason you are required to defend your thesis. We already live in a world where any sort of criticism is considered a personal assault. Do we want to go back to medieval times where criticizing authorities was considered blasphemous? No, in contrast- the higher the authority, the more scrutiny must be applied to the work. Like Marco said, incorrect citations and references in a peer-reviewed paper are a no-go and show the massive problem we face with peer-review nowadays. In this regard I am very grateful for Thorsten's work. Mistakes must be called out and resolved. -
RE: The Voynich Manuscript’s positional entropy collapse
DG97EEB > 10-09-2026, 11:37 AM
Mistakes must be called out and resolved in the right forum. Scientific discourse and review is essential to the process. I am not taking issue with that at all, however this forum is not the proper place to do that in my view.
The correct thing is a personal note to Rod giving him the opportunity to submit an erratum to Cryptologia and a note back to Torsten apologising for the embarrassing oversight and asking for his opinion on the paper itself. If that proves unsatisfactory , then a letter to the editors at Cryptologia is usual. However what is not normal is to decry a paper based only on its citations as if it is some kind of gotcha that invalidated the entire argumentation. I would accept if Torsten argued on the substance, but focussing on this point which Rod has now clearly defended, seems to me unnecessary.
Maybe I'm too British, but this would not seem to me to be the sporting and Gentlemanly thing to do. It is not about causing offence. No one has the right not to be offended. It is about proper discourse in the correct forum.
The wider question that should concern everyone is how did a peer reviewed paper get approved with obviously incorrect citations.
This is the final opinion I shall offer on the matter -
RE: The Voynich Manuscript’s positional entropy collapse
Rafal > 10-09-2026, 12:31 PM
Very sorry to hear how it developed.
I believe Torsten has right to point out some mistakes in quoting the sources but he could do it in a more friendly way and if he had a preprint version, he could do in in a private correspondation.
Don't forget people that we shouldn't really be enemies or competitors here. We should be buddies sharing the same niche interest and having fun together.
We are already losers for the world, having unhealthy fascination with some old, dusty stuff that won't give you money and nobody else cares for
So we need to support each other and not "cut wings" of other people.
I hope everybody involved will be able to shake hands at some moment. -
RE: The Voynich Manuscript’s positional entropy collapse
eggyk > 10-09-2026, 12:45 PM
(09-09-2026, 10:47 PM)Torsten Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.5. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. Cited for the claim that "character distributions at word boundaries differ markedly from those in medial positions, with medial transitions exhibiting especially high predictability." I have not been able to consult the article and make no claim about everything it contains. What can be established is how the field cites it.
Why include a reference in this list if you haven't read it yet? You say you make no claims about everything it contains, but are then quite happy to add it to the list as "used for claims their sources do not support ".
(09-09-2026, 10:47 PM)Torsten Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.All of this is checkable in a few minutes by anyone with the volumes to hand, and all of it is correctable in an erratum. I make no claim here about the paper's methodology or its conclusions; that is a separate discussion, and I may come back to it.
Is it? Sure, the incorrect references can be checked more easily, but checking your analysis of the conclusions of all of the reports cannot. Statements like this are not exactly straightforward to check:
(09-09-2026, 10:47 PM)Torsten Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Across transcription conventions: they state that conditional entropy is to some extent affected by how characters are divided, and give the -iin case (three characters in EVA, one in Currier). Their claim is that character division cannot lower entropy to Voynich levels, which is a different and narrower statement.
I agree with Rafal that if your access was a free preprint version of the paper, it would have been far more friendly to raise issues privately so they could be solved without this public criticism. And frankly, if we are going to treat voynich ninja as an official forum for raising these issues, perhaps it would also be prudent to declare the use of AI for the writing and phrasing of those posts when applicable. Just throwing it out there. -
RE: The Voynich Manuscript’s positional entropy collapse
rikforto > 10-09-2026, 01:28 PM
(10-09-2026, 07:26 AM)Dunsel Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.You also wrote that all of this is “checkable in a few minutes by anyone with the volumes to hand.” Not everyone doing independent research has a university library in their backyard, institutional subscriptions, or immediate access to every historical volume you happen to have available. That is one of the reasons independent researchers rely on public archives, digitized sources, repositories, and whatever tools they can get their hands on.
Which citations in your bibliography did you not have access to?