Session 6: Phase 2: registered tests, brute force, five surveys; book v1.1
2026-10-22 · ledger S-003 · test · Kyle Prier, Claude (Anthropic)
A pre-registration framework with surrogates, a 103-language reference, planted-key controls and a held-out split; nineteen hypotheses tested, including substitution and homophonic searches over 187 language samples; five methods surveys (cryptanalysis, linguistics, bioinformatics and signal, imagery, emerging methods). Book v1.1 added Part V.
Left open
3| The joint segmentation solver (the one search not made) | Built in session 7 (fragmenting-cipher solver). |
| Acquire v101/GC2a for the transliteration check | Done in session 7. |
| List-type reference texts | Done in session 7. |
Questions raised
2| Is it a cipher of a known language? | QST08JG2PB04SQP | |
| Is it a list, index or shorthand? | QST08JG42980WJ9 |
Answers proposed
20Evidence found
11| No one-to-one substitution of a known language fits | EVD0D8GDM4R4AB8 |
| The sheet, not the page, is the unit of composition | EVD0D8GDMCJ49MN |
| Words spelled alike are used alike | EVD0D8GDMMC3M2G |
| No repeated four-word phrases | EVD0D8GDMW61R3Z |
| Word order carries almost no information | EVD0D8GDN405FYV |
| Ring text has the word-initial profile of labels, not paragraphs. | EVD0D8GDNBT1ZKQ |
| A three-state HMM recovers onset, nucleus and coda glyph classes. | EVD0D8GDNKM0S9P |
| Nearest languages: CV-syllable and agglutinative | EVD0D8GDNVE132N |
| Homophonic substitution of five languages fails | EVD0D8GDP383XD5 |
| Word-as-letter, periodic transposition, position-keyed alphabets, single nulls and sorted… | EVD0D8GDPB24104 |
| Paint campaigns do not follow quires, scribes or languages (herbal green coverage). | EVD0D8GDPJW1174 |
Runs
23Methods used
15| Profile screen against 103 languages | MTH08JFX79E1JSQ |
| One-to-one substitution over 187 samples | MTH08JFX7H86QG9 |
| Homophonic solver with planted-key controls and permutation null | MTH08JFX7S22DTX |
| Sequence structure: MI decay, compressibility, BPE curve, repeated phrases | MTH08JFX80W51QQ |
| Page similarity against physical structure (leaf, bifolio, binding) | MTH08JFX88P5HN6 |
| Form-function coupling (spelling vs context similarity) | MTH08JFX8GG2NBR |
| Hidden Markov model of glyph classes | MTH08JFX8RA1CFM |
| Register by locus type (paragraph, label, ring, radial) | MTH08JFX9044RZM |
| Null-glyph deletion | MTH08JFX97Y19ZK |
| Canonical-order (sorted anagram) test | MTH08JFX9FR7TJ7 |
| Periodicity, transposition and isomorph battery | MTH08JFX9QJ1JD6 |
| Entropy law and word-order gain | MTH08JFX9ZC4HW8 |
| Held-out context scaling (Kneser-Ney orders 1-8) | MTH08JFXA767X5C |
| Pigment map from the page images | MTH08JFXAF04AXR |
| Transliteration dependence (GC v101) | MTH08JFXBP22EK4 |
Datasets used
1Sources consulted
275What it produced
6| Reading Without a Key | SRC0D8NJAWT22V4 |
| Methods survey: cryptanalysis | SRC0D8NJBCE48D0 |
| Methods survey: linguistics and datasets | SRC0D8NJBM8396W |
| Methods survey: bioinformatics and signal processing | SRC0D8NJBW275GE |
| Methods survey: imagery and symbology | SRC0D8NJC3W5WZN |
| Methods survey: emerging mathematics and machine learning | SRC0D8NJCBP11SK |
The session's log
Date: 2026-10-22
- Built the testing framework (data/analysis/framework/): PROTOCOL.md (pre-registration; surrogates at six levels; 103-language reference distribution, 187 samples incl. vowel-less; planted-key positive controls; decision rules; held-out split by quire 1,3,5,7,13,15,20), hypotheses.yaml (19 entries), results.csv (every run). Appendix E prints the registry.
- Reference data: Christodoulopoulos–Steedman Bible corpus → 103 equal-length samples plus vowel-less forms (langs.py). Reader fix: the rosettes fold-out (fRos) had been skipped by the IVTFF reader; included from this session (no phase-1 printed figure changed).
- Tests run: profile screen (T1); one-to-one substitution over 187 samples (T2); homophonic solver v2 with planted-key controls (T3a: 100%/98%; vowel-less Latin 98%), 19 Voynich searches over languages × units × spaces (T3b), frequency-matched permutation null (T3c); MI decay, compressibility, BPE curve, repeated phrases (T4); page similarity vs physical structure (T5); form–function (T6); HMM (T7); register by locus type (T8); null-glyph deletion (T9); canonical order (T10); periodicity/transposition and isomorphs (T11); entropy law and order gain (T12); held-out context scaling (T13). Paint map from the Yale images (I1).
- New results: sheet-level vocabulary coherence (z 9.6) with no binding-order signal (z 1.0); form–function coupling beyond any language; no repeated 4-word phrases; word order worth 0.39 bits/word (103 languages ≥ 0.83); held-out word bigram worse than unigram; ring text in the label register (q- 1.9% vs 15.5%); HMM onset/nucleus/coda. Exclusions: one-to-one and homophonic substitution of five languages, word-as-letter, periodic transposition, position-keyed alphabets, single nulls, sorted anagrams, paint campaigns by quire. Vowel-less Latin is the nearest miss (gap 0.34 vs control 0.02) and fails the transfer rule.
- Surveys: five methods surveys (cryptanalysis; linguistics & datasets; bioinformatics & signal; imagery & symbology; emerging math/ML), ~180 searches and ~120 fetches, written up with VERIFIED/UNVERIFIED tags in data/analysis/research_reports/. Condensed into Appendix F; ranked next experiments in ch. 25 (joint segmentation+substitution solver; list-text references; generator competition; v101 transliteration; morphology induction; Ponzi matrix as data; water across gutters; change-points).
- Book: Part V (ch. 20–25), Appendices E and F, eleven new figures (vizkit, lint clean), table 23.1 generated from the outputs; 145 pp. Bibliography extended (Christodoulopoulos 2015, Knight 1999, Goldsmith 2009, Li 1992, Bentz 2017, Reddy & Knight 2011, Oranchak et al. 2024, Rozanova & Temerev 2026, Shannon 1949, Ponzi 2016, Wastl & Feger 2014, Davis 2024 MSI, Pelling 2018).
- Open items: Kyle's read-through; the joint segmentation solver (the one search not made); acquire v101/GC2a from voynich.nu for the transliteration-dependence check; list-type reference texts; higher-resolution plates for print.