Re: VMs: Re: Re: Inks and retouching

["GC" <gc-@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Nick wrote:

> I'll be honest - Strong's magic key seems arbitrary (where did it come
> from?), his character count is inconsistent in places, his tables seem
> wishful thinking, and his decoding seems ambiguous at best. His solution
> provides no explanation at all for why common pairs - like "qo" "or" "ol"
> "dy" etc - should occur, nor any explanation for the stroke structure, nor

A search of the archives will reveal my posts on the origin and approach to
this material.  Not a magic key at all, but derived from 'cribs' into the
text found in the work of Feely and O'Neill.  A look at the material would
have demonstrated that he used a capitalization rule of his own - known
positions were marked with capitals, questionable or guessed positions were
written as lower case.  About 30% of the text is out of sequence because of
problems with transcription, and the validity of his text is around 50%.
All in all, the two pages he deciphered was an admirable attempt, and formed
the foundation of my own approach.  I have no other word to describe the
material other than 'brilliant', simply brilliant.

> This all hides a deeper problem: that the plaintext Strong extracted from
> the ciphertext seems more complex than the ciphertext itself (which has a
> great deal of, for example, letter adjacency structure). Is that not some
> kind of indication that there is a gap between the two which was filled by
> his imagination?

Again, you miss the periodicity problem, though I know we've had private
discussions on this and I've made posts to the list on the subject.  the
Voynich is filled with two and three letter groups, but guess what?  The
'half-spaces' relate to these groups.  Strong thought the word was the unit,
that the system changed after every word, and tried to conform.  With more
pages at hand, I know that the word is the *longest* period, but many words
are split into groups of two or three, so that pairs may be taken from the
tables.  Look at the string itself - 1-3-5-7-9-7-5-3-1 are all spaced by
two, while the string section 1-4-7-4-1 is spaced by three.  A little
variation in a glyph, and you have an instant offset of two or three.

I've also given more information on this, that there are three alphabets in
play at any given time, and they 'fade' in out.  As example - the first
paragraph = bets 1,2,3, the second paragraph bets 2,3,4, etc.  You're not
scaling up or down a long list, but working with a relatively closed set, so
ambiguity is minimized.  Had Strong had more information at hand, he would
have deduced many of the things that I found through hard work, and even
though he has long since passed, I've learned from his methodology, and I
doubt I would find this approach in modern text.

Go back to the archives again, and you'll see me mentioning that the choice
of alphabets tends to go along with the 'numbers of things' on the page.
This is where my question of the importance of 'color' came in, at a time
when we had no such information available.  Now I know that the color does
not apply, but the 'number' relation remains the same.  We know now that
both the drawings and text were done in most instances before color, which
doesn't take a thing away from my previous observations, but does answer the
question of color quite nicely.

> If there *is* some kind of cyclical polyalpha going on here, it's not at
> the apparent glyph level as Strong believed. Cryptologically, the
signature
> of cyclic polyalpha is that plaintext structure gets destroyed (except in
> key-length separated substrings), and - unless you have any specific
> evidence that supports Strong's key-length assertion, never mind his
actual
> key contents - that is not the case here.

Strong didn't believe your representation, and that's why he called it a
'peculiar' use of a polyalphabetic.  I've certainly provided enough
information over the 3 years especially, that could or should have made one
think for a moment, and I've even highlighted the main points here once
again.  I've said that nobody looks for key lengths of 2 or 3, but that's
primarily what you get by using his 12-long sequence, even if there weren't
other manipulations going on simultaneously.

> Where someone floats an idea without any apparent awareness of the
relevant
> evidence that might falsify that idea, I think it's in everyone's interest
> for that person to be made aware of it - surely testing nice ideas against
> awkward evidence is the basis of science? FWIW, I believe in "laissez
> faire", not "laissez err". :-o

You're obviously applying this statement to my own work, as well as to other
ideas put forth.  If you remember back a couple of years ago, I made the
private offer to give you all the information I had, so you could either
prove or disprove Strong's (and my) approach, but you didn't take the offer,
and now I find you trashing something you haven't taken the time to
understand, something evidenced by your misconceptions that I'm responding
to in this very post.  I don't need to quote any other idea than this to
know that you have in this case at least, demonstrated "laissez err", not
"laissez faire". :-o

My respect for you is immense, you're a brilliant man and a good person to
talk to off-list.  I even consider you a friend, the number of which I can
count on 1 1/2 hands.  Rayman used to say that he loved watching people 'run
around in ever decreasing concentric circles'.  I don't share the humor.  I
find it depressing.

GC

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