Voynich-related novel reviews…

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In much the same way that the Voynich Manuscript has provided a blank screen for generations of amateur cryptologists to project their code-breaking desires onto, it has in recent years provided a rich loam for writers to plant their novelistic seeds into.

In the bad old days of novel-writing, the VMs would simply have been treated as an interchangeable cipher-based Macguffin, a time capsule mechanically carrying [powerful / occult / heretical] ideas forward from the [insert bygone era name here] to satisfy the present-tense needs of the plot. Plenty of old-fashioned writers continue to hammer out such formulaic Victorian penny-dreadful tat even now: what kind of barrier could ever hold back such a tide?

Thankfully, contemporary writers have begun to engage with other ideas in the cloud of ideas surrounding the VMs. Though I personally don’t think it will turn out to be delusional nonsense, channelled writing, off-world DNA-creation technology, or even a deliberate hoax, I think these are interesting angles far more worthy of being explored in fiction.

With this in mind, here’s a list of the novel reviews on my site:-

(1) It’s brutally old-fashioned, but Indiana Jones and the Philosopher’s Stone [review] by Max McCoy presses all the right buttons. It knows it’s a piece of junk but simply doesn’t care: it’s having too much fun. Recommended!

(2) I had high hopes for “PopCo” [review] by Scarlett Thomas, but it just ended up like a creative writing collage. If you can cope with the crypto-geeky Gen-X No-Logo buzzwordiness of the whole concept, you’ll probably enjoy it: but for me it fails to work on most levels.

(3) Rather than engage with the VMs directly, “Vellum” [review] by Matt Rubinstein creates an Australian doppelganger of it, and has a lot of fun exploring a would-be decipherer’s descent into madness and/or confusion. Recommended!

(4) “Enoch’s Portal” [review] by A.W.Hill boils up a heady stew of alchemy, cultishness and quantum pretension, where Leo Levitov’s Cathar hypothesis about the Voynich Manuscript is merely one of many spices sloshed into the mixing bowl. No Michelin stars, sorry.

"Verifying" the Verifier Method…

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John Sweat’s “The Anthropogene” is a nice ‘lost history’ blog I recently stumbled upon: what caught my eye was a post of his that mentioned the Voynich Manuscript and tried out Gordon Rugg’s seven-step “Verifier Method”. As this is what Rugg allegedly used when he made his famous “VMS is a hoax” claims in 2003/2004, I thought it perhaps should be examined in more detail. Sweat summarises Rugg’s 7 steps as:-

  1. “Accumulate knowledge of a discipline through interviews and reading.
  2. Determine whether critical expertise has yet to be applied in the field.
  3. Look for bias and mistakenly held assumptions in the research.
  4. Analyze jargon to uncover differing definitions of key terms.
  5. Check for classic mistakes using human-error tools.
  6. Follow the errors as they ripple through underlying assumptions.
  7. Suggest new avenues for research that emerge from steps one through six.”

All of which can, I think, be summarised even more brutally:-

  1. Engage with so-called “experts” and their writings
  2. Decide if those “experts” are indeed actually experts
  3. Do those experts have a particular agenda?
  4. Do the words they use get in the way?
  5. Are their theories basically built on sand?
  6. See how their errors beget other errors
  7. Work out the biggest issues, and continue until you’ve had enough

This seems to be describing intellectual history, which I would characterise as a thinky, “Florentine humanist”-style knowledge-critiquing methodology based around herding all the arguers in a field together, logically dismantling their arguments, and then using whatever is left standing to construct tentative explanations. Technically, the difference between intellectual history and the history of ideas is that the former tends to see ideas as actively shaped by agendas and as flowing between cultural frames of reference, while the latter tends to try to engage with ideas-in-themselves. (Having said that, the Wikipedia entry for history of ideas cites Michel Foucault as a sympathetic practitioner, yet he sees everything as a product of the agendas implicit in cultural frames of reference. But I digress!)

At its best, intellectual history throws up dazzling insights: in the hands of a master (such as the extraordinary Anthony Grafton), it can be a virtuoso performance of brain over matter, not unlike a QC’s persuasive mastery of his or her brief. Yet at its worst, it can be a sterile exercise in intellectual futility, divorced from the world by its shallow insistence on examining only the participants and their claims, not the validity of the evidence expressed in the ideas, and so ending up in a kind of over-finessed, intricate superficiality.

As an example, even though Grafton’s generally excellent book on Leon Battista Alberti shows precisely how Alberti’s form and ideas flowed from classical topoi, I think Grafton perhaps takes the whole humanist conceit (that if we all wrote as well as Cicero the world would be a better place) a little bit too literally – whereas humanism was by and large more like a courtly Latinistic game of patronage – and as a result his book never really engages with Alberti the person.

If we bear this kind of thing in mind, it should be reasonably clear that Rugg’s “Verifier Method” looks to verify not evidence qua contents but instead expert opinions qua methodology: a kind of faux legalistic framework, with the investigator as self-appointed armchair judge in his/her own kangaroo court, and with no power or desire to step outside into the real world.

In the case of the Voynich Manuscript (in case you were wondering when I’d ever mention it), I think the Verifier Method falls right at steps (1) and (2). Because Rugg’s conceptual framework had no mechanism to critique evidence (in particular the various transcriptions of the text), and what separates experts in such an uncertain field is by and large their conception of what constitutes relevant evidence, Rugg has no intrinsic way of deciding who is (and who is not) an expert, let alone trying to infer their agendas (3) or to diagnose any linguistic/semantic difficulties (4)

Essentially, it seems to me that the Verifier Method relies so heavily on the underlying field being regular that it fails to be a satisfactory tool to apply to such irregular areas of study as the Voynich Manuscript. But the problem then is that regular fields of study tend not to need exploratory methods such as the Verifier Method to help traverse them.

Finally, I think that “Verifying” is such a weak aim of any knowledge methodology as to be virtually useless: as a strategy, all it really tries to elicit is some kind of limp correlation. The “Cardan Grille” nonsense that Rugg concocted to “verify” that the Dee/Kelley hoax hypothesis was “possible” is precisely such a thing: of course the hypothesis was possible, that’s why it was a hypothesis, duh. Come on: when dealing with an uncertain field, when would the Verifier Method ever be preferable to Popper’s Falsificationism, where you collect together plausible hypotheses and actively design experiments to try to kill them? Now that’s what I call proper Popper science…

Thorndike on the Voynich Manuscript!

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I’ve often wondered what Lynn Thorndike thought of the Voynich Manuscript: after all, he (his first name came from the town of Lynn, Massachusetts) lived from 1882 to 1965, and continued to publish long after his retirement in 1950, and so was active before, during and after the 1920s when Wilfrid Voynich’s cipher manuscript mania/hype was at its peak. As a well-known writer on alchemy, magic and science, my guess is that Thorndike would surely have been one of those distinguished American academics and historians whom Voynich tried so hard to court after his move from Europe to New York.

One of my ongoing projects is to work my way through all of Thorndike’s works, as it seems to me that his science/magic research programme carved a trail through the jungle of mostly-unread proto-scientific manuscripts that probably falls close to where the Voynich Manuscript is situated: and few historians since him have felt any pressing need to build on his work except in generally quite specific ways. All of which is why I happened to be reading Chapter VII “Nicholas of Cusa and the Triple Motion of the Earth” in Thorndike’s “Science & Thought in the Fifteenth Century” (1929).

Firstly, you need to understand that Thorndike thought that the whole Burckhardtian notion of the (supposedly fabulous and extraordinary) Renaissance was plain ridiculous: there were countless examples of ingenuity, invention, and insight throughout the Middle Ages (and, indeed, throughout all history) to be found, if you just bothered to take the time and effort to place events and writings within their own context.

Furthermore, Thorndike believed that lazy historians, having set up this false opposition between (high) Renaissance culture and (low) medieval scholasticism, then went looking for exceptional individuals who somehow bucked that trend, “forerunners, predictors, or martyrs of the glorious age of modern science that was to come.” (p.133) The list of usual suspects Thorndike suggests – “Roger Bacon, Nicholas of Cusa, Peurbach and Regiomontanus, Leonardo da Vinci” – appears to me not far from how the fake table of Priory of Sion Grand Masters would have looked, if Pierre Plantard been a tad more receptive to non-French history.

Of course, Thorndike – being Thorndike – then goes on to demonstrate precisely how the whole myth around Nicholas of Cusa arose: basically, German historians looking out for a German ‘forerunner, predictor, or martyr‘ plucked three marginal fragments from Nicholas’s work and wove them together to tell a story that was, frankly, not there to be told. Then you can almost feel the fever rising in Thorndike’s genuinely angry brow when he continues:

“Could anything, even the most childish of medieval superstitions, be more unscientific, unhistorical, and lacking in common sense than this absurd misappreciation and acceptation of inadequate evidence, not to say outright misrepresentation, by modern investigators and historians of science?” (p.137)

Punchy (and grouchy) stuff: but he’s far from finished yet. He has an example of something even more scandalous which he feels compelled to share with us:-

“When are we ever going to come out of it? To stop approaching the study of medieval science by such occult methods as the scrutiny of a manuscript supposed to have been written by Roger Bacon in cipher, instead of by reading the numerous scientific manuscripts that are expressed in straightforward and coherent, albeit somewhat abbreviated, Latin?” (p.137)

So there you have it. In 1929, while Wilfrid Voynich was still alive, Thorndike took a measured look at Voynich’s and Newbold’s “Roger Bacon Manuscript” nonsense, and placed it straight in the category of “absurd misappreciation and acceptation of inadequate evidence, not to say outright misrepresentation“.

John Manly may have been more dismissive of Newboldian cryptography in his article in Speculum 6 (July 1931), but Thorndike was no less dismissive of Newboldian history in print in 1929. Just so you know!

Adam McLean and Voynich baths…

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On 12th April 2008, artist and well-respected alchemy expert Adam McLean posted up a fascinating picture of the baths of Pozzuoli he had found from the third quarter of the fifteenth century, and commented on its many strong similarities with the Voynich Manuscript’s water section. Excellent research, I thought… but how come I hadn’t seen it before?

Though Adam didn’t mention his source, a little detective work revealed that the image is entitled “Balneum Sulphatara“, folio 4 of Valencia Bibl. Universitaria MS 860 (formerly 138). And I had seen it before: an extremely over-exposed black-and-white version appears as plate 62 of C. M. Kauffmann’s classic 1959 “The Baths of Pozzuoli: A Study of the Medieval Illuminations of Peter of Eboli’s Poems“. But really, you’d barely recognize them as the same.

Unusually, Valencia MS 860 has good date and provenance information for it. Kauffman (p.82) says that De Marinis dates it between 1455 and 1458: and that it stayed in the “Aragonese royal library in Naples until the Franco-Spanish conquest of 1501“, when it moved to Spain until the present day. Kauffman also asserts that it was derived from the Bodmer (Geneva, Bibliotheca Bodmeriana) De Balneis MS, which he dates to the “third quarter of the fourteenth century”, and placed as “Southern Italian”.

If you compare the Bodmer Balneum Sulphatara drawing (f.3, Kauffman plate 21) with the Valencia one (f.4, Kauffman plate 62), you can see the reasons why the former was very probably the source of the latter: every figure is reproduced between the two MSS, each with extremely similar size and orientation. Their differences are merely ornamental: the wooden bath sides got upgraded with a fancy fish-like motif in the Valencia MS, while the top edge of the cave has taken on a stone-like ‘wolkenband’ appearance there.

But the big question: was either of these also a source for the Voynich Manuscript? I’ve gone through all the plates in Kauffman really closely, and I have to say that on that evidence I really don’t think that the water section of the VMs is an enciphered De Balneis. However, I am quite sure that the VMs’ author had definitely seen a copy of De Balneis and was influenced by it when constructing his pictures, in the same way that Rene Zandbergen persuasively argues that the author must have seen the manuscript now known as MS Vat. Gr. 1291 before drawing the zodiac section.

In fact, I interpret this in terms of steganography, in that I believe the style used for Vat. Gr. 1291 was appropriated as the cover cipher for the VMs’ zodiac section, while the style used for the Bodmer MS and Valencia MS 860 formed the cover cipher for its water section. Whereas the particular drawing similarities between the VMs and Valencia MS 860 simply arose from having been drawn in the same general period: correlation, but not causation.

I should close by noting that Adam McLean made his own in-depth art history study of the Voynich Manuscript, posting his results on the set of pages here. One of the most compelling similarities comes from his comparison of the lozenge-shaped tiles in the picture here: but that’s a discussion for another day…

Secret Histories and "The Lie Agreed Upon"…

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Here’s a nice two-page article (here and here) by Timothy Doyle from the BookThink site on the role ‘Secret History’ plays in SciFi fantasy literature: it’s titled “The Lie Agreed Upon” because that was how Napoleon famously characterised history. (Though he actually used the words “A fable agreed upon“, which [according to Wikipedia] he probably took from Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle‘s Mélanges de Littérature (1804), while the basic phrase is also widely attributed to Voltaire).

Anyway… Doyle’s theme is that in a secret history novel, all the surface details of historical fact remain basically the same, but the reader is invited to peek behind the curtain at all the political and technical machinations and intrigue that keep that lie propped up. As opposed to an ‘alternate history’ novel, where both surface and undercurrents diverge from the historical record.

It’s a nice piece, which leaps deftly from SF to The X-Files, to the Da Vinci Code, to the many parallels with the Voynich Manuscript (basically because most VMs theories seem to start from a secret history or a similar novelistic premise), to Neal Stephenson’s wonderful Cryptonomicon, to Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (and a couple of works of his I didn’t know), to Tim Powers, and so forth: Lev Grossman’s Codex even gets a honourable mention in the also-rans list at the end. All of which are riffs probably familiar to most Voynich News readers.

My favourite sentence from the article is this:-

“What is really interesting about Secret Histories is the shifts in historical meaning that occur, much like the optical illusion where a slight shift in perspective suddenly changes the beautiful girl into an ugly witch.”

I think Doyle comes splendidly close here to capturing the essence of Voynich theories: each seek to violate and redirect the currents beneath the historical record, with the theorist all the while using the keen magicry of the illusionist to silently cover up the implicit shift in meaning. Naturally, theory proponents see themselves as ‘unliars’, truth-tellers: but all (possibly bar one) are closer to novelists than they would like to admit. Ultimately, shouldn’t we agree with Napoleon/de Fontenelle/Voltaire that history is little more than a story we agree to accept? (…or is that a story in itself?)

"Codes and Ciphers through The Middle Ages"…

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I happened upon the following post a few days ago here, and thought I ought to reproduce it here for anyone that’s interested (the cryptography history lane tends to be filled with caravans, and as a result is somewhat slow-moving). When the volume finally appears (in 2009?), I’ll be just as interested in the paper on the Voynich Manuscript as the rest of it. Having said that, I’m a bit concerned that Kahn is not only misspelt but a little bit misrepresented (for instance, Kahn discusses medieval Arabic cryptology on pp.89-99) in the blurb.

Oh, and they’re not interested in publishing two papers on the VMs in the same volume. Just so you know not to offer them one (like I did, *sigh*).

* * * * * * * *

Call for contributions for a volume of collected essays:

Codes and Ciphers through The Middle Ages

This call is designed to expand and enhance an essay collection that is based on two panels entitled “Codes and Ciphers through The Middle Ages,” which took place at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo MI, in 2006 and 2007.
It seeks to fill a major gap in the study of codes and ciphers in the medieval world. The codes and ciphers of the Middle Ages have received little or no modern scholarly attention. David Khan’s 1181-page volume _The Code-Breakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet_, for example, devotes a mere thirty-four pages to the ancient and classical world, and little more than one sentence to the Middle Ages, claiming that “ciphers, of course, had been used by monks throughout the Middle Ages for scribal amusement” (106). But the construction and use of codes, ciphers, secret languages and mathematical secrets in the Middle Ages were much more than amusement: they were central to intellectual culture as modes of concealing dangerous, magical or secret information, and as a means of connecting oneself to the divine. As such, they appear in the writings of major figures ranging from Isidore of Seville to Hrabanus Maurus, Alcuin and Hildegard of Bingen. They also figure in the manuscripts of lesser known students of magic in Heidelberg, and numerous anonymous texts and manuscripts including Anglo-Saxon riddles, Old Norse literature and runes, and the computus. Clearly, codes and ciphers were a multilingual, cross-period, inter-cultural phenomenon in the Middle Ages; they warrant more scholarly attention. Given current emphases on “security,” and the proliferation of forms of encryption on the internet, fostering scholarly discussion of history of cryptography seems especially relevant to the 21st century. Current contributions address the uses of codes, ciphers, secret languages and mathematics in the writings of Hildegard, the Voynich Manuscript, Anglo-Saxon riddles, Hrabanus Maurus’ _In honorem sanctae crucis_, the Pseudo-Bedan _Propositiones_ and the _Propositiones ad Acuendos Juvenes_ attributed to Alcuin. While we welcome contributions on any aspect of codes and ciphers in any period of the Middle Ages, we are especially interested in essays that will widen the scope and increase the depth of the collection.

Please submit detailed abstracts or drafts of essays (style: CMS 14th edition) by 1 July 2008 to: Sharon M. Rowley at [email protected] or [email protected]

Enigmatic Instrument…

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Here’s a nice bit of craft by someone called “iisaw” (Eric Coyote Elliott), who’s made a fabulous astrolabe-like instrument and posted a couple of pictures of it on the DeviantArt website – click on the picture there for a detailed view.

enigmatic_instrument_by_iisaw_mini

As you should be able to see, Eric used Voynich lettering (probably the EVA font) when etching enigmatic script on his enigmatic instrument. He writes:-

This “Cosmolabe” is a prop for a movie. The fifteen circular symbols on the front represent different worlds and the signs on the outer rim are components of magical runes used to travel between the worlds. The instument itself is a way to calculate which runes need to be used for opening gates between specific places.

Cool! What’s also nice is the way that it mirrors many of the circular diagrams in Quire 9. As to the text, I can see “qoksheedy” (which only appears on f108v) there, though the phrase it is in does not: so it looks to me like he’s done a nice job of simulating Voynichese, possibly even better than Gordon Rugg’s grilles ever did. 🙂

Voynich Manuscript and Chelsea FC…(?!)

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Yes, I’m probably just as amazed as you are: that a lowly pop-culture artefact such as the VMs could ever be plausibly mentioned in the same sentence as Chelsea FC. Tolstoy or Chekhov (the writer, not the Star Trek navigator, you fooool) maybe: but… the Voynich Manuscript? Naaah.

Yet in post #566 on “The Intelligent Forum” at CFCnet forums, long-time forum member “Hanuma” writes:

“We weren’t the first or last side to struggle against [Liverpool], so Rafa hardly worked out the Voynich Manuscript when he went all-out defence and hoped for the best.“

Stunning stuff! 🙂

"The Voynich Prophecy"…

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Well, we now have a name for Richard Douglas Weber’s forthcoming Voynich novel: “The Voynich Prophecy”. His author page on the Publisher’s Marketplace site seems to describe his novel as a euro thriller with a kind of neo-Nazi alchemy twist: he’s also posted up a four-minute video montage on YouTube for the book, where it is described as an “occult conspiracy thriller”.

Curiously, Weber’s whole media approach to novel promotion / marketing seems quite opposite to the kind of thing novelists have been doing. I went to a lecture in the Borders in Kingston a few days ago given by the very pragmatic Alison Baverstock (soft-promoting her actually very good book “Marketing Your Book: an author’s guide“): sadly, the best current advice she had for authors seemed to be to try to make press out of your personal circumstances, the examples given being (a) losing half a limb (b) sleeping with a celebrity, or (c) having police take over your house during an armed incident.

As for me, I feel caught in the no-man’s land between these two extrema: while I have no huge faith in the traditional book-selling industry’s agenda and methodologies in the age of the Internet and digital print, I’m still just that bit too old-fashioned to montage loads of borrowed images on YouTube. But I have an MBA: and MBAs are forever looking for a “middle way” that finesses the best of both worlds, rather like intellectual historians steering a path between unreliable accounts. Hopefully I’ll find my own answers in the end…

The d’Agapayeff Cipher, continued…

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In a recent post, I mentioned the idea that the d’Agapeyeff cipher might involve a diagonal transposition on the 14×14 grid cryptologists suspect it may well have been based upon. To test this out a bit, I wrote a short C++ program (which I’ve uploaded here) which turns the number pairs into characters (for convenience) and prints out all four diagonal transpositions (forward, reverse, forward boustrophedon, reverse boustrophedon) starting from each of the four corners.

Because the number of doubled and tripled letters is a simple measure of whether a transposition is likely to be plausible or not, I counted those up as well. The next metric to calculate would be the unique letter adjacency count (i.e. how many unique pairs of letters appear for each ordering)… but that’s a task for another day.

Interestingly, transpositions starting from the top-left corner (and their reverse-order reflections in the bottom-right corner) have no triple-letters at all, as well as far fewer double-letters (9/10/11 compared to 13/14/15) than transpositions that start from the top-right. Though intriguing, I don’t know if this is statistically significant: I haven’t determined what the predicted doublet and triplet count would be for a totally randomised transposition, perhaps calculating that too that would be a good idea.

For any passing cryptologers, here is the ASCII version of the d’Agapeyeff cipher (as output by the C++ code) when arranged as a 14×14 grid (in numerical order but without J), followed by the 16 diagonal transpositions with their associated double & triple counts. My guess is that the top left corner reverse diagonal transposition (the second one down, starting “KBDMIDPIK…”) is most likely to be the correct transposition, but we shall see (hopefully!) if this is true…

K B M P Q B Q D L D Q I P O
D I I M O N L C L L I I M B
D K N M O Q K I E N K K K S
C E E L C L K P K K D B M R
P I C M K I N L E L O P D P
D P P C M G B N B L L G L D
C K M L D N C M P L C C C Y
I L Q Q O C P O E D P E B T
B B P Q P Q I Q G K D E K F
E N B D I L M O B M D Q L S
E B D O O Q N P I Q L E G I
N N P M N D B G B E B N K R
G C M M G G N M P O K M L N
G O B M N K L D K I P L B R

*** Top left corner ***
Forward order…
KDBDIMCKIPPENMQDIEMOBCPCLONQIKPMCQLDBLMCKLKCLEBQLMIKILDE
NPQDGNPELQNBBQONBLKNIIGNDDPCCNEKKIPGCPOIQPMBLDKMOOMMOLIO
PLOBKBBMNQMQELLPMSMGDNOGDCGDRNGBPBKPCLPKNGIMDECDLMBQDEBY
DPELQKTKOBELFIKNGSPMKILLRBNR
–> number of doubles = 11, number of triples = 0
Reverse order…
KBDMIDPIKCQMNEPBOMEIDQNOLCPCDLQCMPKILCKLKCMLBDLIKIMLQBEQ
LEPNGDQPNEIINKLBNOQBBNPIKKENCCPDDNGOMKDLBMPQIOPCGBKBOLPO
ILOMMOSMPLLEQMQNMBRDGCDGONDGMPLCPKBPBGNDCEDMIGNKYBEDQBML
TKQLEPDFLEBOKSGNKIIKMPRLLNBR
–> number of doubles = 9, number of triples = 0
Simple boustrophedon (forward then reverse)…
KBDDIMPIKCPENMQBOMEIDCPCLONQDLQCMPKIBLMCKLKCLDLIKIMLQBEE
NPQDGNPELQIINKLBNOQBBNGNDDPCCNEKKIPOMKDLBMPQIOPCGOMMOLIO
PLOBKBSMPLLEQMQNMBMGDNOGDCGDRPLCPKBPBGNKNGIMDECDYBEDQBML
DPELQKTFLEBOKIKNGSIKMPLLRNBR
–> number of doubles = 10, number of triples = 0
Reverse boustrophedon (reverse then forward)…
KDBMIDCKIPQMNEPDIEMOBQNOLCPCIKPMCQLDLCKLKCMLBEBQLMIKILDQ
LEPNGDQPNENBBQONBLKNIIPIKKENCCPDDNGGCPOIQPMBLDKMOBKBOLPO
ILOMMOBMNQMQELLPMSRDGCDGONDGMNGBPBKPCLPDCEDMIGNKLMBQDEBY
TKQLEPDKOBELFSGNKIPMKIRLLBNR
–> number of doubles = 9, number of triples = 0

*** Top right corner ***
Forward order…
OPBIMSQIKRDIKMPLLKBDDDLNDPLYQCEKOGCTBLIKLLCBFQNKPELCEKSP
OQKLBLPELIMMOLNNPDDQGRBIMCIBMEKDEKNKINLKGCOGMLNLRDKEMMNP
QBQBMBDECCDCIOIEKLCIPLOQMPBOPPPMQPLNGPIDKQQIQBMKCLPDODND
IBBONGLBNDMGKEBPMNENMMNCBGOG
–> number of doubles = 14, number of triples = 2
Reverse order…
OBPSMIRKIQPMKIDDDBKLLYLPDNLDTCGOKECQFBCLLKILBSKECLEPKNQI
LEPLBLKQOPRGQDDPNNLOMMNKEDKEMBICMIBRLNLMGOCGKLNIKBMBQBQP
NMMEKDLKEIOICDCCEDPOBPMQOLPICIPGNLPQMPPKMBQIQQKDDNDODPLC
LGNOBBIKGMDNBNMPBEMMNEBCNOGG
–> number of doubles = 15, number of triples = 1
Simple boustrophedon (forward then reverse)…
OBPIMSRKIQDIKMPDDBKLLDLNDPLYTCGOKECQBLIKLLCBFSKECLEPKNQP
OQKLBLPELIRGQDDPNNLOMMBIMCIBMEKDEKNRLNLMGOCGKLNIKDKEMMNP
QBQBMBLKEIOICDCCEDCIPLOQMPBOPIPGNLPQMPPDKQQIQBMKDNDODPLC
IBBONGLKGMDNBEBPMNMMNENCBOGG
–> number of doubles = 13, number of triples = 0
Reverse boustrophedon (reverse then forward)…
OPBSMIQIKRPMKIDLLKBDDYLPDNLDQCEKOGCTFBCLLKILBQNKPELCEKSI
LEPLBLKQOPMMOLNNPDDQGRNKEDKEMBICMIBKINLKGCOGMLNLRBMBQBQP
NMMEKDDECCDCIOIEKLPOBPMQOLPICPPMQPLNGPIKMBQIQQKDCLPDODND
LGNOBBIBNDMGKNMPBEENMMBCNGOG
–> number of doubles = 14, number of triples = 0


*** Bottom right corner ***
Forward order…
RNBRLLIKMPSGNKIFLEBOKTKQLEPDYBEDQBMLDCEDMIGNKPLCPKBPBGNR
DGCDGONDGMSMPLLEQMQNMBBKBOLPOILOMMOOMKDLBMPQIOPCGPIKKENC
CPDDNGIINKLBNOQBBNQLEPNGDQPNEDLIKIMLQBELCKLKCMLBDLQCMPKI
QNOLCPCBOMEIDQMNEPPIKCMIDBDK
–> number of doubles = 11, number of triples = 0
Reverse order…
RBNLLRPMKIIKNGSKOBELFDPELQKTLMBQDEBYKNGIMDECDNGBPBKPCLPM
GDNOGDCGDRBMNQMQELLPMSOMMOLIOPLOBKBGCPOIQPMBLDKMOGNDDPCC
NEKKIPNBBQONBLKNIIENPQDGNPELQEBQLMIKILDBLMCKLKCLIKPMCQLD
CPCLONQDIEMOBPENMQCKIPDIMDBK
–> number of doubles = 9, number of triples = 0
Simple boustrophedon (forward then reverse)…
RBNRLLPMKISGNKIKOBELFTKQLEPDLMBQDEBYDCEDMIGNKNGBPBKPCLPR
DGCDGONDGMBMNQMQELLPMSBKBOLPOILOMMOGCPOIQPMBLDKMOPIKKENC
CPDDNGNBBQONBLKNIIQLEPNGDQPNEEBQLMIKILDLCKLKCMLBIKPMCQLD
QNOLCPCDIEMOBQMNEPCKIPMIDDBK
–> number of doubles = 10, number of triples = 0
Reverse boustrophedon (reverse then forward)…
RNBLLRIKMPIKNGSFLEBOKDPELQKTYBEDQBMLKNGIMDECDPLCPKBPBGNM
GDNOGDCGDRSMPLLEQMQNMBOMMOLIOPLOBKBOMKDLBMPQIOPCGGNDDPCC
NEKKIPIINKLBNOQBBNENPQDGNPELQDLIKIMLQBEBLMCKLKCLDLQCMPKI
CPCLONQBOMEIDPENMQPIKCDIMBDK
–> number of doubles = 9, number of triples = 0*** Bottom left corner ***
Forward order…
GOGBCNMMNENMPBEKGMDNBLGNOBBIDNDODPLCKMBQIQQKDIPGNLPQMPPP
OBPMQOLPICLKEIOICDCCEDBMBQBQPNMMEKDRLNLMGOCGKLNIKNKEDKEM
BICMIBRGQDDPNNLOMMILEPLBLKQOPSKECLEPKNQFBCLLKILBTCGOKECQ
YLPDNLDDDBKLLPMKIDRKIQSMIBPO
–> number of doubles = 14, number of triples = 2
Reverse order…
GGONCBENMMEBPMNBNDMGKIBBONGLCLPDODNDDKQQIQBMKPPMQPLNGPIC
IPLOQMPBOPDECCDCIOIEKLDKEMMNPQBQBMBKINLKGCOGMLNLRBIMCIBM
EKDEKNMMOLNNPDDQGRPOQKLBLPELIQNKPELCEKSBLIKLLCBFQCEKOGCT
DLNDPLYLLKBDDDIKMPQIKRIMSPBO
–> number of doubles = 15, number of triples = 1
Simple boustrophedon (forward then reverse)…
GGOBCNENMMNMPBEBNDMGKLGNOBBICLPDODNDKMBQIQQKDPPMQPLNGPIP
OBPMQOLPICDECCDCIOIEKLBMBQBQPNMMEKDKINLKGCOGMLNLRNKEDKEM
BICMIBMMOLNNPDDQGRILEPLBLKQOPQNKPELCEKSFBCLLKILBQCEKOGCT
YLPDNLDLLKBDDPMKIDQIKRSMIPBO
–> number of doubles = 13, number of triples = 0
Reverse boustrophedon (reverse then forward)…
GOGNCBMMNEEBPMNKGMDNBIBBONGLDNDODPLCDKQQIQBMKIPGNLPQMPPC
IPLOQMPBOPLKEIOICDCCEDDKEMMNPQBQBMBRLNLMGOCGKLNIKBIMCIBM
EKDEKNRGQDDPNNLOMMPOQKLBLPELISKECLEPKNQBLIKLLCBFTCGOKECQ
DLNDPLYDDBKLLDIKMPRKIQIMSBPO
–> number of doubles = 14, number of triples = 0