Re: VMs: Solution guidelines

[Gordon Rugg <g.rugg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>

Dear Rene,

I've posted several hundred words on my website. Most of the statistical properties of Voynichese (e.g. distributions of word lengths; longer words at the start of lines than in the middle
or at the end; non-random frequencies of combinations of syllables/characters) are in principle easy to manipulate using the table and grille technique - for instance, by populating the
cells on the left of the table with longer syllables than those in the middle or on the right. In practice, this is time-consuming and fiddly, which is why I focused on other features of
the manuscript rather than producing sample text to demonstrate each point. The LSC scores that I've produced so far are probably different from those of the VMS because I started with
weakly structured tables (ironically, because I thought that would produce output more like Voynichese). The distribution of characters and syllables is easily manipulated via the table
and grille method, but there are very large numbers of permutations, which is why my student and I are now working on a software implementation which will allow testing different
permutations. Mark Perakh's previous work on LSC in the VMS suggests explicitly that a highly structured form of artificial gibberish could explain the LSC scores of Voynichese, so we'll
be looking at much more structured tables, with a view to posting results in January.

With regard to Nick's post, my findings are compatible with a "demonstration of principle" ciphertext, but it would need to contain a very low amount of signal relative to the surrounding
noise - probably less than 10% signal.

Best wishes,

Gordon

>
>
> Maybe a step in the right direction would be
> to require posts of this nature to present at
> least a minimum amount of text (one page? 400
> words?). Then everyone has the right to
> ignore posts which don't adhere to this ....
>
> Really, what would help is if the poster of the
> proposed solution shows that the encryption
> method changes the statistical properties of
> the plain text into those we see in the VMs
> text.
> However, if the poster is not aware of these
> properties.....
>
> Cheers, Rene
>
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