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

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Gordon,

At 16:42 18/12/2003 +0000, Gordon Rugg wrote:
> We may be at cross-purposes here. I think that the tables (if this method 
> was used)
> can probably be reconstructed; however, I think that the appropriate 
> method for
> this is not use of statistics and probability theory (which is what I 
> understood
> you to be advocating). I'm hoping that some of the crypto people can 
> tackle this -
> as I've said, it's not my field.

As a crypto guy, I think it would be fair to say that it would take a bit 
more definition to operationalise your paper into something testable - so 
would characterise it as still being at an early research stage. 
Cryptanalysis almost always comes down to a combination of intuition and 
brute force statistics, so stats and probability theory would always be the 
main tools for getting under the skin of a code - intuition alone is rarely 
sufficient.

> As for the deliberate use of more than one table, there are several 
> reasons for
> suspecting this. One is Philip Neal's observation that some pages look as if
> they've been filled in as alternate lines for some reason.

...whatever that reason is (penmanship? stylistics? methodology? content? 
encoding?) But AFAICR, Phil doesn't claim that this is true for all pages 
(which would be false), but only for some. It might then be easier to 
restrict brute force searches to pages where palaeographic analysis can 
shown it be false. All the same...

> Another is the pattern
> of syllables if you set out VMS pages as a spreadsheet, removing dains and 
> first
> lines - the impression that came through when I tried this was that there 
> were two
> different tables involved, with noticeably different syllable 
> distributions (though
> you could get the same thing from a single table with "bands" of different
> syllables running through it - for instance, a few rows with lots of "qo" 
> prefixes,
> then a row or two with "o" or "dy" prefixes).

I'm not sure about this at all. I've certainly noted letter distribution 
differences at the paragraph level in the past, but not at the line level. 
Has anyone tested the statistical significance of letter distribution at 
the level of the line?

One relatively straightforward way to doing so might be to determine 
whether, within any given paragraph, the letter distribution of the first 
half of a line is a better predictor of the second half of the line than 
the first half of the next line down. Towever, there are a few subtleties 
to address - ie, (1) how to handle unsampled characters, (2) whether to 
convert to glyphs first, (3) whether to pairify first, etc.

So, I'm less interested in whether multiple tables (or trickily "banded" 
tables) could achieve this result than whether it actually exists or not - 
and whether it is more true in Language A, Language B, the recipe section, etc.

> In terms of testable hypotheses, I'm putting forward the hypothesis that 
> something
> with the features and complexity of Voynichese can be produced using 
> tables and
> grilles. It had previously been claimed that the VMS was too complex to 
> have been
> hoaxed, and I believe that this claim has now been disproved.

I don't think you're quite there yet. Unless you can demonstrate a little 
more of the mechanics, you're giving a proof by anagram (where all the 
information is stored in your tables, and anagrammed to generate the VMs). 
Again, it's the <<accounting for all features>> criterion which it stumbles 
over.

Cheers, .....Nick Pelling..... 


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