An explanation of the Voynich Manuscript text

[DonaldFisk]

Going back to the deck of cards, what measure for "slowness" of the suggested process did you have in mind, and how exactly did you imagine the execution? A real world (manual) applicability seems rather crucial in our case.

The order of a deck of cards is accepted as sufficiently random enough for a professional play of 17+4 after it has been shuffled seven times using a shuffling machine. Humans have many, many different ways of shuffling cards by hand.

People don't know "random" (what: apples, pears?) because they are never looking at anything manmade featuring true randomness. Anyone who only slightly touches on the topic of RNGs must get a glimpse how hard it is to get hands on sufficiently "good enough" random numbers for computational purposes. The generation process will leave a trace in the output, if ever so faint - which allows for reverse engineering.

Any method involving tangible things is by orders of magnitude more prone to produce telling patterns in the pseudo-random output.

I believe your method(s) could be deduced, given a few good enough hints (and GPU's). This hasn't been the case for any   VMs text, sofar.

While I oppose the argument that overseeing statistical text features would be out of bounds for a XV.(±) creation  (Al-Kindi, complications in diplomatic renaissance chiffres etc.), the concept of propability seems a more modern development to me. Generally, I'd like to ask for more linguistic clarity (denoting realm, or scope), because "Randomness is the lack of pattern, coincidence is pattern itself."

Now you have raised the term "writing order" and I guess I'm not the only one looking forward to what you have to offer in this regard.

I'm not particularly attached to any specific implementation, and it's unclear which random distribution I'm seeing here, now that it seems the first glyph of words depends on the last glyph of the previous word, something I didn't know about and so didn't take into account.   If the input's Poisson, it rules out cards.

Regarding determining the writing order, the inputs are the PCA of the pages, the illustrations, the handwriting, and what's inferable about the original binding.   I'm not particularly attached to the page clusters I derived, but I think they're good enough to test the general method.   Incidentally, I'm surprised only one other person (Sarah Goslee) seems to have done Principal Component Analysis, which I only recently discovered because she didn't call it that.   I get the impression that very few people are using computing power to its full potential.

I'm not sure how much more effort it's worth my putting in.   I can justify the effort to date: I now have a half-decent statistical library for my Lisp dialect, and have made various other improvements and bug fixes.   It probably depends now on my writing code for another purpose which can then be applied to the Voynich Manuscript.   Most people don't care or at best agnostic, and the few who do care almost all disagree, understandably if they've spent a lot of time and got nowhere, or are attached to a particular theory of their own.