Re: VMs: Follow-up

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi "surfing t" (what were your parents thinking of? *sigh*),

At 09:27 21/06/2004 -0400, "surfing t" wrote:
> thanks for your replies and suggestions everyone! I'm now studying EVA so 
> I can ask more intelligent questions in the future. I have found a need 
> for the availability of a program that can assist one in the effort of 
> understanding the document. As soon as I'm done with my exams, I will 
> write such a program. The features I need right now are:
>
>   * Capability to convert between foil names and Benecke page numbers - 
> and with capability to download & display images in a window upon request.

Feel free to look at the Javascript code running my converter, it's not 
rocket science - actually, it's barely even computer science. :-)

> If you have any suggestions for more features, please let me know.

I'm not sure what you're trying to do with it. If you install the 
LizardTech sidfile viewer & use one of the batchfiles mailed to the list to 
rename the 100620890890203 id numbers to their proper names, you've got 
most of what you wanted, I think. :-)

> As for the introduction of myself: I'm studying math and computer science 
> and I have a part-time job in cryptography. I'm very interested in the VM. 
> Of course, I wouldn't be so interested if it turns out to be a hoax. So 
> right now I'm trying to decide for myself if I think its a hoax or not. I 
> don't want to spend a lot of time on the VM if chances are its a hoax, so 
> I'm looking for indicators that it isn't.

Erm... isn't that the wrong way round? If anybody could simply decide 
whether it was a hoax or not, we wouldn't have this mailing list. :-o

>  By examining some of the one-word-labels and seeing how they are 
> distributed in the document (there should be more occurences close to the 
> picture) and by collecting repetitions among the same labels in multiple 
> images, one could get hints on the degree to which this document is ciphered.

Not really: by doing that one might get hints as to the degree to which 
this document is trivially decipherable. (An even bigger hint: it isn't).

> If I find the expected distributions my guess is this isn't ciphered but 
> is simply written in an odd language. It's also possible it's a hoax, but 
> the more stuff we find that is as we would expect, the less likely this 
> becomes. If anyone has done research in this direction please let me know.

There's tons of research to read through - but don't forget that if there's 
some kind of "verbose cipher" (for example, "ol", "qo", "dy", etc) at play 
in Voynichese, nearly all analyses to date will have been done on the 
*wrong alphabet* (ie, on the "fake alphabet", not on the "real alphabet").

In fact, if you want a good VMs-related crypto project, you might simply 
consider trying to resolve the question of which pairs of glyphs are most 
likely to be verbose pairs (ie, code for single tokens). Visually, the 
answer seems fairly obvious - "qo", "ol", "al", "ar", "or", "ee", "eee", 
"eeee", "ii", "iii", "iiii", "eo", "dy", "cho". But is this provable? How 
does it affect typical stats (like word-length distribution, etc)? 
Something to think about...

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

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