Re: VMs: No stats no fun ---> no stats no blinkers! :-)

[Rene Zandbergen <r_zandbergen@xxxxxxxxx>]

I wrote:

> >The stats that have been produced up to now will
> >tell you _exactly_ where the text of the VMs is
> >unusual. This is where our chances for cracking
> >it lie.

And Nick: 

> To my eyes, the VMS exhibits unusual properties in
> nearly every statistical 
> test that's been done. So, do our chances of
> cracking it lie nearly everywhere?

I wouldn't say that. A number of things appear 
quite normal, and it's worth keeping them in mind.

The alphabet size seems of the right order of
magnitude. Currier had 36 'glyphs' but some of
them could be composites, and many of them
harldy ever occur. GC seems to be counting
somewhere just under 26. 

Word length statistics are quite resonable, 
the Zipf law for word frequency is followed
rather accurately and the vocabulary size is
normal for a text of this length.
These observations together say something about
the validity of word spaces and the absence of
polyalphabetic substitution. 
Of course, one always has two choices:
1) the encoding process of the text of the VMs
left some statistic unaltered
2) the encoding process was cleverly designed in
order to behave like this.

Another important statistic is the pattern of
long-range correlations which is completely normal
in the VMs (compared to other plain texts). While
nobody really understands what causes it in detail,
it is  something that does not exist in meaningless
texts (randomly generated, or as a result of 
arbitrariy swapping words around).

I agree with Nick that statistics don't say
anything about causality. They say what can be
observed, but they don't say why this is.
That is left to the analyst. An example is
Bennett who showed in his book that the second
order character entropy of the VMs language is
very low. The only natural language he came up
with that had nearly the same low entropy was
Hawaiian. His finding was important, but it 
was incomplete, and the suggested connection with
Hawaiian was misleading, if not wrong.

Our tools aren't wrong. We're trying to climb
the Mount Everest and we have an altimeter.
The altimeter isn't going to carry us to the top,
and it isn't going to point us to the shortest
route. But it will tell us when we got there,
and it will tell us whether we're going up
or down. Better not throw it away.

(And I award 10 points to whomever finds the
connection between the Voynich MS and the Mount
Everest).

Cheers, Rene

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