VMs: possible solution

[Gordon Rugg <g.rugg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear All,

You might be interested to know that it's possible to replicate most of
the
qualitative and quantitative features of Voynichese by using a modified
Cardan
grille in combination with text generation tables. My article on this
will be
published in Cryptologia in January 2004. In brief, the tables contain
syllables
along the lines postulated by Stolfi; the grille contains enough slots
to show
one "word" at a time. There are restrictions on the patterns of slots in
the
grille, and these restrictions interact with regularities in the table
layout to
produce different frequencies of combinations (including restrictions on

co-occurrence of otherwise common syllables or characters). This
produces text
which shows most of the features of Voynichese; the values for Letter
Serial
Correlation are different, but that's probably because my original
tables were
not sufficiently structured. I'm working on this now with colleagues.

The use of a modified Cardan grille suggests a date after 1550. This
method is
well suited to producing meaningless gibberish for a hoax, and provides
suggestive evidence that the VMS could have been hoaxed, probably by
Kelly. It
is possible to adapt this method for reversible encryption, but the
linguistic
features of the VMS suggest that this was not done in the VMS using the
methods
that I identified. Again, this is described in my Cryptologia article.

I've issued a press release about this and put up some material on the
Web,
since the story looked likely to break before the article was published.
Both
the release and the Web material are somewhat simplified because of
space
constraints (in the press release) and not wishing to pre-publish large
chunks
of my Cryptologia article (in the web site), so my apologies to group
members
for any apparent distortions as a result. What I argue in the
Cryptologia
article is that the hoax hypothesis now looks like a feasible
explanation (if
the LSC scores turn out to be replicable, which appears likely).

My website is at: http://www.keele.ac.uk/depts/cs/staff/g.rugg/voynich/

The sample text on the website doesn't show all the features of
Voynichese for various reasons (mainly logistical). The Cryptologia
article demonstrates how the remaining features can be implemented. One
of my students is working on a software version of the table and grille
method, which will make it a lot easier to produce text in a
machine-readable format; we'll post the results for the group to analyse
once this is done.

Best wishes,

Gordon

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