Re: VMs: Declaration of WAR against EVA

[Gabriel Landini <G.Landini@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Monday 03 Mar 2003 4:15 am, GC wrote:
> What you are basically saying here then is that 'entropy' as you
> define the art, is the predictability of sunset colors blending
> from yellow, to red, to purple, and beyond? 

No, it is a measure of unpredictability of the characters/symbol/pixels in a 
source.

> So what you're telling me here is that writing the letter 'a' in
> the English language may not carry the same information as that
> contained in that letter's strokes?

That's correct in "information theory" terms. The strokes encoding is likely 
to be more redundant.

> So the word 'bad' written
> 'bad' is not as 'bad' as the word 'bad' written 'beid' as you
> would in EVA? 

That's correct too. The two representations are not the same.
I think that there is a confusion between "meaning" and "information content".
They are not the same thing.
Have a look at J. R. Pierce's book: An Introduction to Information Theory: 
Symbols, Signals and Noise. Dover Pubns; 2nd edition (June 1980).

> Let's just get clear about this, so there is no misunderstanding.
> 'Frogguy' was an attempt to make Voynich pronounceable, as if
> anybody actually wanted to 'speak' Voynich.  EVA followed, stating
> unequivocally that its intention was to 'make Voynich
> pronounceable'.  Same ridiculous goal, same result.  

I seem to recall mentioning this not long ago, but just in case it wasn't 
delivered, here we go again: it is easier to transcribe if one can pronounce 
it. At least it is to me, so I use it.
Most EVA symbols which are likely to be more than 1 have been discussed 'ad 
nauseam' and are easily convertible with Bitrans. Some aren't, like the 
spectrum between <r> and <s> and the plumes <'> which some believe should be 
different characters, but drawing the line is very arbitrary, specially 
without good reproduction images. With Rene, we resorted to write [r|s] and 
use VTT to choose either the first of 2nd choice.

If there is an alphabet that I think it is better than EVA to transcribe, I 
will certainly use it (and so will everybody else I guess).

Anyway, going back to entropy, its value in the vms is too low, no matter 
which alphabet was used to represent it:  
http://web.bham.ac.uk/g.landini/evmt/ent+.gif

Cheers,

Gabriel


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