Discussion of "A possible generating algorithm of the Voynich manuscript"

[Torsten]

But then would a medieval scribe have the patience and/or the motivation to generate it?

My answer to your question is that it is the most effective way to generate some dummy text. Imagine that someone in medieval times wanted to write a mysterious book. His goal is to write a book nobody is able to read. What is the best way to generate manually large amounts of dummy text?

I am not arguing that self-citation isn't the most efficient way to create a hoax text. My argument was that, with my analysis results indicating that the algorithm was probably more complex than this self-citation method, the author must have had a lot of patience/motivation to create a hoax text.

Keep in mind: "We don't argue that the text was created by a computer program and we also don't argue that our program is able to simulate the complexity of human behavior" (Timm & Schinner 2019, p. 15). We have kept the algorithm as simple as possible. Our goal was to demonstrate that even our simple implementation "reproduces the intriguing key properties of the original text, including the presence of long-range correlations, the 'binomial-like' word length distribution, and both of Zipf’s laws" (Timm & Schinner 2019, p. 2). We also say: "Of course, it is possible to pinpoint quantitative differences between the real VMS and the used facsimile text (most likely any facsimile text). An example is the quantitative deviation of the <q>-prefix distribution from the original VMS text" (Timm & Schinner 2019, p. 15).