Re: VMs: Declaration of WAR against EVA

[Jacques Guy <jguy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

3/2/03 11:15:56 PM, "GC" <glenclaston@xxxxxxxxx> 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?  Don't get me wrong.
>I fully understand 'entropy' when applied to known and unknown
>languages.  I simply do not understand how such a general
>calculation can aid in deciphering a cryptogram.  

By confirming, or infirming, certain properties of the
cryptogram. Take a cocktail-shaker and a gaming die.
Open the cocktail-shaker, put the die, ace up.
Close, shake. Open. Which face is up? Repeat a few time.
If the ace is up most of the times, you have now a
range of hypotheses:

1. the die is loaded
2. someone has smeared glue on the six
3. there is a small magnet buried in the six, _and_
   the cocktail-shaker is made of magnetic material
4. it was just one of those freaky runs, keep shaking

The unpredictability of the next roll (shake) of the
die is its second-order entropy--the distribution of
the symbols on its faces is its first-order entropy,
and the number of its faces (six) is its zeroeth-order
entropy. Forget the jargon. Consider the outcome of
successive rolls, or shakes, of a die:

1,5,2,4,5,5,6....

It's a "text". The entropies of this text can tell you
if the die is fair and fairly rolled. If it is not,
however, they cannot tell you which explanation
is right: of whether the die is loaded by weight,
or by magnets, or the player is a die mechanic.

If the "text" is not a sequence of die rolls, but a
real text, then for instance, if its entropies are
equal (i.e. H0 = H1 = H2 = H...., that is, if its
zeroeth-order entropy is equal to its first, second,
third, etc.) the text is completely random. Conclusion:
either:

1. it is meaningless

or:

2. it is a cipher (and a very very good one).

> Please help.

C'est fait.

>
>> It takes no mathematical knowledge to see that spelling
>> variations increase the unpredictability, e.g. "I am
>> pretty sure that the next word is going to be 'night',
>> but how is it going to be spelt? Night or nite?"

>So you're saying that your interpretation of Voynich 'entropy'
>gives no indication of spelling variation whatsoever

Given the same text in English, once spelt without variations,
once again spelt with variations, the entropy of the first
is typically lower than that of the second. ("Typically" in
the mathematical sense).

> at a time
>when its most likely composition included multiple spelling
>variations?

We do not know the time, we do not know the language. At the
presumed time English was full of spelling variations, Italian
was not.

>  Gosh, maybe its enciphered?  Please help.

If it is enciphered, then the values of its entropy help
rule out a lot of ciphers.

>> Among other things, if the VMS is a cipher,
>> this rules out a vast number of enciphering schemes--
>> a polyalphabetic cipher for instance.

>In your face, Jacques!  This is precisely why I'm going to be
>drinking a tall stout and eating my favorite pizza while you're
>sitting alone, sucking on cigars and wondering why you haven't
>been invited.

I guess that means that you believe that the cipher IS
polyalphabetic? Then:

1. it enciphers a very, very low entropy text, like "baa baa black sheep,
   baa baa baa, baa baa white sheep, baa, baa, baa"

or (inclusive "or")

2. it uses lots of nulls.


> My personal peeve?  You instigated the EVA
>transcription.  

I didn't! I did Frogguy, not EVA!


>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?  

Yes. Because writing the letter 'a' is already an interpretation
of the data. That 'a' could have been written for a capital 'A',
it could have been written for an italics 'a' (which looks more
like an 'o'). By writing that 'a' instead of (italics) 'a' as
it may have been in the original, you have _destroyed_ information,
AND you have assumed that those three glyphs (A, a, italics a) were
allographs of the same grapheme. To posit that, you need to have
deciphered the text, and identified its alphabet. If you do
it in order to better decipher the text, you are begging the
question.


>Tell me truly, what more information can you derive from 'm' when
>it its written 'in'?  

When you write 'in' or, better, Frogguy 'iv', you know that you
are dealing with a glyph composed of an i-like stroke followed
by one looking like a 'v'. When you write 'm' you must remember

1. how it really looks
2. that perhaps it is two glyphs, not one

>but that
>train has long since derailed due to lack of evidence.

The only evidence for <iv> being a single glyph is that
<v> is almost always preceded by <i>. Writing it as
its two elementary strokes enables you to bring this
evidence. If you write it as a single glyph in the
first place, all you have as evidence is "it's one 
single letter because I say so."


>Ask yourself - are you satisfied with a transcription whose
>primary purpose was to make the Voynich 'pronounceable'

Stuff and nonsense. The primary purpose of Frogguy was 
a transcription that looked as much as possible like
the original and as such was easy to learn, difficult
to forget. You can sit at a keyboard typing Voynich
as Frogguy without even thinking. You can look at
the printout in Frogguy, and pen in the "real" Voynich
text without thinking. The purpose of EVA, however,
was to make Frogguy pronounceable, and to do that,
it had to lose some of the "spit-and-image" feature
of Frogguy. You have to remember that the thingy
that look half-way between 8 and & is to be written
d, and so on.



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