Psillycyber > 23-07-2016, 06:08 PM
Sam G > 23-07-2016, 07:23 PM
(23-07-2016, 06:08 PM)Psillycyber Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Hi all,
So, for quite a while I've wondered why Torsten Timm's auto-copying hypothesis hasn't made a bigger splash in the Voynich community.
Quote:the average edit distance between words in the VMS is anomalously low compared to other texts... Natural languages don't work like this.
Quote:This computational attack would settle, once and for all, that the VMS must either be a constructed language,
Quote:a cipher, or gibberish.
Anton > 23-07-2016, 08:08 PM
Quote:So, for quite a while I've wondered why Torsten Timm's auto-copying hypothesis hasn't made a bigger splash in the Voynich community.
Quote:That the VMS is not encrypted is basically proven by the low second-order entropy of the text, since virtually all ciphers increase entropy. The main exception, verbose ciphering, is ruled out by the lack of repeated strings (no long words and no repeated sequences of short words).
Sam G > 23-07-2016, 08:35 PM
(23-07-2016, 08:08 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Quote:That the VMS is not encrypted is basically proven by the low second-order entropy of the text, since virtually all ciphers increase entropy. The main exception, verbose ciphering, is ruled out by the lack of repeated strings (no long words and no repeated sequences of short words).
Is the fact that all ciphers increase entropy mathematically proven? I think it is not. So there are no foundations to state that. One may state that "all ciphers known to this person increase entropy", but that would not disprove the hypothesis that VMS is enciphered since it well may be enciphered by a cipher unknown (indeed, if it were enciphered with a known cipher, it would have probably been deciphered long ago).
So it is by no means "proven" that VMS is not a cipher.
Quote:For the verbose ciphering, is it ruled out? What if it is supplemented by shuffling?
Anton > 23-07-2016, 09:09 PM
Quote:Whether it can be mathematically proven or not I'm not sure, but there is certainly no such cipher known to modern cryptography. So you're left arguing that someone in the early 15th century invented some entropy-lowering cipher that was never subsequently rediscovered (not even with the VMS to serve as an example) and indeed that appears theoretically impossible today.
Sam G > 23-07-2016, 09:49 PM
(23-07-2016, 09:09 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Really not more impossible than the assumption that someone in the early 15th century wrote in a language in which no writings have been discovered afterwards.
Anton > 23-07-2016, 10:05 PM
Quote:The thing is that the number of possible languages is basically infinite.
Quote:On the other hand, the number of enciphering mechanisms is inherently limited
Sam G > 23-07-2016, 10:36 PM
(23-07-2016, 10:05 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Quote:On the other hand, the number of enciphering mechanisms is inherently limited
I don't see why it is inherently limited. Enciphering is producing output by applying certain operators, rules or procedures to the input. Since a procedure can be a combination of procedures and, next, one can imagine infinity of combinations, therefore the number of enciphering mechanisms is inherently unlimited. It is much the same as the number of mathematical functions is unlimited.
Anton > 23-07-2016, 11:28 PM
Psillycyber > 23-07-2016, 11:36 PM
(23-07-2016, 07:23 PM)Sam G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.His theory didn't really explain anything. He would basically just take two lines of similar text and assert that one was copied from the other. Of course, the similarity could be for any other reason (such as similar vocabulary or grammar in a meaningful text).
(23-07-2016, 07:23 PM)Sam G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.That English or other European languages don't have this property does not prove that no natural language does. Also, well-developed theories regarding what properties natural languages may or may not have basically do not exist.
(23-07-2016, 07:23 PM)Sam G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.If you concede that a valid constructed language could have this property, then you would also need to show that such a language could not have arisen naturally.
(23-07-2016, 07:23 PM)Sam G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.That the VMS is not encrypted is basically proven by the low second-order entropy of the text, since virtually all ciphers increase entropy. The main exception, verbose ciphering, is ruled out by the lack of repeated strings (no long words and no repeated sequences of short words).
(23-07-2016, 08:08 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I think that is mainly because Torsten's hypothesis implies that the whole stuff is meaningless, while there are many tiny obstacles to the meaninglessness of the text. To name my favourite one:
otol and odaiin are the two most frequent "Voynich stars" (labeled objects in f68r1 and f68r2), and they are both mentioned in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (supposed to serve for some introduction or summary).