Re: VMs: Voynich and bee-dance

[Nick Pelling <nickpelling@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone,

At 17:51 27/11/2004 +0100, J.Siemons wrote:
> Came around this, from the University of Tilburg ,The Netherlands, Oct 20,
> Something with the VMS and insect language.....
>
> http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/cs/pdf/0406/0406054.pdf
>
> Wonder if I do understand a lot of it, Oh well.

AIUI, Dr Paijmans' paper asks whether we can transcribe/notate bee dances 
so as to look for Zipf-Law-like behaviour, & hence to see whether it has 
language-like behaviour. Though the author doesn't actually follow this 
idea through, he/she feels sufficiently confident by the end to conclude 
that it doesn't.

Despite citing Gabriel Landini, I think that Paijmans hasn't really learnt 
the overall lesson of the VMs' encounter with Zipf's Law, which is that its 
presence/absence is a weak correlative factor in areas of uncertain 
"languageness" (like the VMs), & not really solid enough ground to build a 
proof upon.

Also, Paijmans clearly flags an information-centric bias (just like Gordon 
Rugg's), which is based on (what I would call) an innately positivistic 
view of communication, where a transmitted signal must be *certain* (ie 
perfectly quantized and perfectly precise, AKA "the map *is* the 
territory"). However, in the context of bee-dances, it is nonsensical to 
say that a single dance codes to...

        5 cybernetic units (sic!) as to direction, 4 to 5 as to
        distance and 2 to 3 as to the number of workers needed. This 
totals to about 12
        bits, equivalent to a human language of 4000 phrases (signifiants 
with corresponding
        signifi´es), needing less than a hundred words by human or english 
standards.
        Put differently, a code of all possible combinations of only three 
characters would
        cover the communication system of the honey bee dance. [p.3]

This misses the key difference between real-world languages and computer 
science grammars: the former operates under conditions of uncertainty, the 
latter under conditions of certainty. Redundancy is built into the heart of 
human languages in order to overcome the mishearings & misinterpretations 
of real-life interpersonal communication, much like error-correcting codes: 
computer grammars (and, I guess, universal languages) operate in a 
different situation entirely. One might just as validly ask, if (as Shannon 
demonstrated) the sequential letter-to-letter predictability (ie, the 
negentropy) of English texts is so informationally low, why do we bother to 
transcribe using 26 letters?

In fact, the key issue skirted by Paijmans' paper is how one should best 
transcribe bee choreography given that we don't actually understand how its 
mechanisms works - trying to recast the problem in terms of "information 
content" (in much the same way that Gordon Rugg does) is actually quite 
unhelpful.

The analogy I'm trying to draw with the VMs should now be fairly clear - 
the "bee-dance" of Voynichese is something we all "understand", but 
transcribing it should ultimately only be a means to understanding the 
underlying mechanisms behind the behaviour.

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


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