Re: VMs: algorithm to generate VMS like text

The algorithm uses data from a previous program that analysed all of the FSG text in the interlinear 1.7 file and produced a list of contact frequencies for each "letter". This is then plugged in to the text generator as a look up table for each letter. I then seed a random number generator and based on the current letter, do a lookup on the table of right hand contact frequencies for that letter to produce the next letter in the sequence. I have treated space as a letter here.

I then thought that if an algorithm can produce text that is alike to the VMS and cannot be proved statistically to differ from the VMS then that algorithm could be a computational representation of a physical process used to generate the text at random. I have an idea of how this might work but want to spend a bit more time on it before posting to the list.

--- Brett Cotton wrote:

> a week or two ago a there was a post saying that it
> would be difficult
> to generate VMS text using a an algorithm. I brought
> together some thoughts that I had recently and now
> have a (not quite perfect yet) program that will
> generate any amount of VMS style text. Here is the
> output of the program when generating 15 lines of
> text:
>
> Input number of lines ?15
>
> OE PTPTCG HCCO2G DC8G AIR AM TC8GHC8 SOHAET2 TC8G

Etc...
That looks quite interesting indeed. Most people
(including myself) are not too familiar with the
FSG alphabet, so it is hard to judge. In fact,
this could be a sample taken straight out of the
VMs and I wouldn't be able to say :-)

The check with Monkey should be quite interesting,
an! d should of course be compared with samples
also done in FSG, unless you make the change to
Courier (my humble recommendation).
For visualisation of the text (but not
for statistics!) Eva is a good candidate since
you can use the Eva-hand 1 font to see whether
it really looks like Voynichese.

Some questions/observations:
- as you are probably aware, one existing piece
of software that can generate VMs look-alike
text is of course Monkey itself, but that is a
bit like 'cheating', since it needs to read
VMs text first, before it can do it.
- Does your program generate the text 'out of
the blue sky', or can it also use a plain text
as an input and convert from that?
A bit of a leading question, isn't it :-)

Cheers, Rene

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