[Article] "The Strange Quest to Crack the Voynich Code"

[Alin_J]

If I understand correctly, they say that you can discriminate meaningful texts by checking if they differ from texts produced by randomly shuffling the same words.

This is basically what they have done, showing that the Voynich manuscript differs from random word-shuffled texts and are compatible with natural texts by the correspondence of the text to almost all of the properties they measured in the natural texts that were shown to be reliable indicators. I have some questions about their methodology though. As quoted in the paper:

The compatibility with natural texts was computed using Eq. (1), where P was computed adding Gaussian distributions centered around each X observed in the New Testament over different languages L. The standard deviation on each Gaussian representing a book in the test dataset should be proportional to the variation of X across different texts and therefore we used the least sigma between English and Portuguese.

Did they assume that their variances (sigmas) in the other languages were the same as for the two languages they had measured many texts of - English and Portuguese? Furthermore, they chose the variance that was smallest (of the English cmp. to Portuguese texts)? Am I understanding correctly?

Then, as I understand, the compatibility was calculated from integration of the upper/lower tails from the measured value, of the interpolated distribution resulting from the use of these sigmas? If these integrals were < 0.05 it is not compatible since it is too far off a reasonable probability. 

I don't know about you, but to me this seems a bit bold... assuming the same sigma from the lower of only two measurements (languages). Not that I think that this would affect much the overall conclusions of the study though.