Re: VMs: Random Text Generation

[Rene Zandbergen <r_zandbergen@xxxxxxxxx>]

--- Nick Pelling replied to Robert Anthony Hicks:

> >If an algorithm can be created that approximates
> Voynichese so well that 
> >the generated text matches real Voynichese to, say,
> 90% accuracy (based on 
> >letter, bigraph, trigraph, word frequencies, zipf
> laws, etc) AND it is 
> >simultaneously found to be impossible to create a
> similar algorithm with 
> >the same accuracy for a real language, the
> implication would be that the 
> >VMS's scribe(s) used some sort of random word
> generation system.

In my opinion that really depends on the type
of algorithm. If that algorithm can only be
defined after a long computer analysis of the 
MS, it would not prove very much. I would be
careful making the jump from 'that it could
be done now in the 21st C' to 'that it could
be done in the 15th' (which is still not saying
that it was actually done).
 
One can also argue about the 90%...

[...]

> The problem is that many features of Voynichese seem
> to be somewhat at odds 
> with the structure of existing languages - for
> example, the large number of 
> unique (yet only slightly different) words relative
> to the size of the 
> text. Why should some words (in the model's
> word-space) exist and others 
> not? Tricky. :-|

If the VMs words are numbers, then they should
be similar in the way we are observing: sometimes
differing by only one. The missing ones can
also be explained. Any text contains a large number
of words that appear only once. Given that we know
that a lot of pages are missing...
Here, I am assuming that the numbering system used
is a system like Greek or Arabic, where the 
symbols used are different for units, tens,
hundreds etc.

Cheers, Rene

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