Re: VMs: No stats no fun

[Gabriel Landini <G.Landini@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Friday 08 Aug 2003 10:50 pm, Nick Pelling wrote:
> Rather, I'm proposing a connected set of hypotheses which (if true) would
> explain why prior statistical analyses of current transcriptions may well
> have been taking secondary structural artefacts (ie, those of a constructed
> word-game designed to resemble language) as their inputs rather than
> primary structural properties: and hence would have been misdirected.

This is not what you said in 2 recent emails. 
What makes the statement of "making stats useless" sound objectable is that 
it seems to imply unawareness of the relevance of the statistical properties 
of the vms.
(This has been posted *many* times in this list, so here we go again for those 
who choose not to read the archives):

These properties *are* there. Whatever method was used to produce the vms, 
they are the result when observed with a certain alphabet transcription. 
These properties are  measurable and reproducible and they are a formal way 
to extract and summarise the information of the data that otherwise does not 
fit in our heads.
They may give indications of what the vms may be or it may not be (example: it 
cannot be a simple substitution cipher because of the low entropy), but what 
it is most relevant bit is that whenever people claim a solution or a method, 
this solution must account for all those statistics as well. 
Getting a "readable" text out of a number of transformations is not enough. 
Applying the method backwards (encoding a plaintext) which does not show 
comparable stats to those in the vms must be, obviously, wrong.

> [...] - all I'm trying to do is to be transparent about my
> observations and theories, on the road I'm taking towards a rigorous
> transcription methodology. My hope is that, by using a better transcription
> as their inputs, future statistical analyses will be able to identify
> primary structural properties in the VMS.

Sounds like if you are intending to dismiss all currently gathered statstical 
information with an analysis that has not been done yet.

Cheers,

Gabriel


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