VMs: Entropy, was WAR against EVA

[Rene Zandbergen <r_zandbergen@xxxxxxxxx>]

--- Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> As per the famous elephant story, we're up against a
> strange beast here - 
> but are we innately blind, or are we merely blinded
> by our tools of enquiry?
> 
> I think it's fair to say that GC believes the latter
> - and that's his right.

Thank goodness we (the computer era VMs students)
are not alone to be befuddled. And even GC
did not go so far as to say that the lack of a
solution to the VMs is due to the bad properties
of the EVA alphabet :-)

But seriously now:

> The entropy of the VMS is too low to be a language
> (not just at the EVA representation level, but
> even at the glyph level):

I know what you mean, but Frogguy may have something
to say about that. I agree that the entropy is
clear evidence that there is indeed a strange beast
here, but the (second order character) entropy
is just one number. The real strangeness of the
VMs 'language' is far deeper. A digraph frequency
count on a square matrix shows even more clearly
that something is wrong. This is the presence
of the 'word paradigms', the fact that words are
written using some pattern. 

> It might be an interesting computer-science exercise
> to estimate the 
> average length of a VMS composite group of glyphs
> needed to remap EVA (or 
> whatever) to the same approximate entropy profile as
> a (say) European language.

I once concluded that the first four characters
of a VMs word contain about the same amount of 
information as the first four of a Latin word 
( http://www.voynich.nu/extra/wordent.html )
so the answer to your question is not unequivocal.

Cheers, Rene

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