Re: Request For Status: Language vs. Cipher

[Zandbergen@xxxxxxxxxxx (Rene)]

Stolfi's and Mark's responses make it necessary that I review my
earlier statements. True, while we have always been used to seeing
the statistics of the Voynich MS text being rather different from
normal languages, there are now also a number of categories where
'Voynichese' scores right among these. Marks results are among
them. More about that a bit later. Also, the graphs on my page:
http://www.voynich.nu/wordent.html show a normal 'vocabulary
build-up'. Maybe there is more, but I'm overlooking it right now.

About Mark's LSC papers, I remember reading the one about the
Voynich MS and coming to the conclusion that it looks very interesting
but I had no idea what the numbers were actually representing.
So I went to the other papers and started reading from the beginning.
Following the math required a bit of time, during which I didn't
want to be on-line. I also got stuck in some of the definitions.
I copied the pages to my disk and realised I forgot a few of the
formulas, which are embedded gifs IIRC. I meant to ask Mark a few
detailed questions but never got that far. I also wanted to include
a summary on my web page but for that I first had to understand
the details. (The placeholder is there :-/)

Anyway, to cut an already too long story short, I meant to read on
but never got round to it. I still think there may be important
clues in there, so I recommend all to look at it.

Mark wrote:

> if anybody did [read the articles], was the absence of reaction due
> to the opinion that it all was crock or that it was just nothing new,
> or to the unwillingness to delve into LSC method.. 

Surely not the first two! Perhaps some variety of the last?
 
> However, I would like to say that the LSC test in itself was proven
> to reasonably well distinguish between meaningful texts,  gibberish
> and artifically created texts with either low or high entropy. 

What is important is to understand precisely how these non-meaningful
texts were generated, and how and why the method identifies them
as such. Then the conclusions about the VMs text can be fully 
appreciated. This requires reading several of the articles...

> The application of LSC to VMS resulted in the data
> exactly like those obtained for meaningful texts in 12 natural languages. The
> LSC tests also revealed a considerable difference between VMS-A and VMS-B,
> leading to a conclusion (arguable, of course) that both were written in the
> same language but A using much more abbreviations than B.

I remember being somewhat uneasy about that last conclusion, but I will
hold back until I really understand the method.

>  Of course I would rather see rebuttals than silence, but
> apparently it is not going to happen.

Don't despair just yet. I have no idea how many people started reading
it. The silence probably means lack of understanding rather than 
disagreement. Mistakes are usually pointed out in a correct, friendly
manner in this list.

Cheers, Rene