Re: VMs: VMS: entropy of my plaintext data for comparison purposes

[Dennis <tsalagi@xxxxxxxx>]

Jacques Guy wrote:
> 
> I have a feeling that h1-h2 might also have to do
> with the frequency of digraphs. 

	Yes.  It specifically shows the frequency of
digraphs.  When I created my Cat Latin, the first
verbose cipher that could give a Voynichese profile, I
deliberately created a system that would have the same
single-letter distribution as the plaintext, but
contain many superfluous digraphs.

> So, phi tells you
> how far from random your text is, and chi2
> how certain you can be of that. This strikes
> me as potentially a much, much better measure
> of entropy.

	Yes!  We need something with a test of significance
attached.

	Let us all remember, however, that "random" does not
mean "meaningful", nor does "repetitious" or
"redundant" necessarily mean "meaningless"  The latter
terms are semantic.  

> Whatever comes out of all this, it looks
> like "my language", even unencrypted, with
> all its 31 letters, is much more Voynich-like
> than English.

	Quite so.

> But this has been keeping me from finish my
> Easter Island article... :-( merde alors!

	Yes again!  That sounds very promising indeed,
although OT here (but one never knows...)

Dennis
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