Praise the bees:
Dana
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, November 29, 2004 12:18
PM
Subject: Re: VMs: Voynich and
bee-dance
On Bee dancing I suggest The Honey Bee, by Gould and Gould (use
abebooks
or whatever, it is out of print).
The notion that such
dancing is composed of units is laughable.
Impressive behaviour for
us non-bees - quotidian stuff for bees; but
not
language.
William
Nick Pelling wrote:
> 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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