Re: VMs: NSU review of Rugg (2003)...

[Gordon Rugg <g.rugg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Nick,

Alas, no, for the reasons below...

Regarding re-use, there's no inherent necessity to re-use a table with
different grilles - it's just more practical. It's worth mentioning that the
tables would almost certainly not be filled with random characters - I'm pretty
sure that's why my initial LSC scores were different from Voynichese (I'd
assumed that largely random tables would be more like Voynichese, and I assumed
wrong!) There was probably a fair degree of pattern in the order in which the
tables were filled. I suspect that the process started at the top left of the
table, and that columns were filled in starting at the left, by someone with
weak maths (yes, that's a serious suspicion, but it would take too long to
explain in this email).

As for detecting the "signature" of a particular table, it's statistically
non-trivial. One issue is that you'd need to assume a particular breakdown of
each word into characters, pairs of characters, syllables, or whatever,before
you could begin any statistical test. If the manuscript is a meaningless hoax
containing gibberish, then there may well be wildcards in there, and deliberate
filling-in of pages using more than one table, plus deliberate creation of
unique meaningless labels - I used all these techniques, and more, when trying
to recreate a hoax. It wouldn't be a case of making some assumptions, running a
test, and calculating a p value - I think that there would be few, if any,
tests which could work with those assumptions which were valid.

I think the best bet is for someone to use classic cryptographic approaches to
try to reconstruct tables. That's not my area, but I'd be very happy to help
anyone who wanted to try this.

Best wishes,

Gordon

Nick Pelling wrote:

> Hi Gordon,
>
> Given the high levels of re-use needed to make tables practicable, surely
> you should be able to suggest a suitable statistical test that should
> correlate with their presence, even for just the first word on a line
> across all folios? Or perhaps for the first word minus the first character?
>
> Cheers, .....Nick Pelling.....
>
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