(19-10-2023, 08:58 AM)pfeaster wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.In case it's of any use, here's a link to another "path" cipher seeking to mimic Voynichese:
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This "checkerboard" cipher has similarities to Nablator's path cipher, but also some differences. I haven't brought it up here until now because I think there are a couple other imaginative models that could match the patterning of Voynichese more closely (a cumulative cipher + syllable-by-syllable encoding, with each "word" being a syllable). But I did come up with a use for opening gallows glyphs and such that made some sense, and this other example might help you scope out the range of variation this sort of approach could have had.
Thank you! My plan is to investigate the whole set of one-to-many character based additive ciphers. That is, ciphers that share two properties:
1) plaintext characters are encoded to the ciphertext one by one or in very small groups, sequentially
2) when two encodings starting from a certain break point (e.g., paragraph or page start) have some common prefix, this corresponds to a common prefix (could be empty) in the plaintext, the reverse is not necessarily true
I'm not sure whether it's possible to get any definite results wrt the applicability of these ciphers to VMS by studying the statistical properties of prefixes of paragraphs and isolated labels, but I want to give it a try.