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

[RenegadeHealer]

Are you sure it is practical? Have you looked at the details of the algorithm inside the app?
This algorithm is what the medieval scribe would have done.
I have not looked into it, but I understand that Nick Pelling has, and he commented that it has quite a number of very specific choices.

In my opinion this concept is modern and would not fit a medieval mind. The best a medieval person could do would be to throw a die, and this is making the process slow.

Fair point, Rene. I did read both of TT's papers, but I must admit I glossed over the appendices with the details of the algorithm. I have no experience coding (unless you count a little bit of BASIC on an Apple ][e back in 1988  ), but flowcharts and sets of logical steps aren't completely over my head. I'll have another look at that algorithm, and maybe even try doing for a page or two it if my kids and patients aren't bugging me.

Torsten, you have a general point that I very much agree with: Generating pseudo-language is a known and predictable human behavior. There are some rather entertaining (and often borderline offensive) examples on YouTube and Reddit of strangers being asked, "Give me your best imitation of someone speaking [foreign language you don't understand]". Adriano Celentano's song You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is probably the most famous example of pseudo-English — listening to this song as a native English speaker is a bizarre experience: I should understand this but I don't.

Koen had a thread where he invited people to compose pages of pseudo-text. I didn't meet the target text length before I ran out of time to finish it, but I must admit, it wasn't that hard to do. It wasn't ridiculously easy either; I had to concentrate to make sure that my text had just the right amount of repetitiveness. Too many or too few unique words, and my text wouldn't look like real language. I did find myself automatically looking back at previous lines I'd composed, looking for old words to repeat, perhaps with slight variations in the spelling. Was this enough to qualify my method as true "autocopying"? I'm attaching the text file to this post for your statistical enjoyment, since I never posted it then.

I'm going to do some research to see if any neuroscientists have approached the question, "What behavioral patterns, and neurological pathways, are involved in the spontaneous production of fake language?" And how are those behaviors evidenced in the properties of the gibberish produced? By answering these questions, it should be possible to design a statistical analysis tool that can tell the difference between real (but not understood) and fake human language, with a fairly good degree of confidence. If textual analysis can tell with a high degree of confidence whether the same author wrote two different pages (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., for example), I can imagine looking for the patterns seen in fake language, but not typically in real language, would be very doable. I sardonically predict that any such algorithm run on the VMs will turn out wholly inconclusive and ambiguous results — "50% confidence that the VMs is gibberish" or something unhelpful like that.

The problem I see is that different people's idiosyncrasies and life experiences will cause them to favor different micro-patterns in the fake language they compose. One would have to analyze many people's long pseudo-text compositions in order to tease out what patterns were common to nearly all human-composed fake language. Because it seems from what Rene is saying, that there's an apples-to-oranges equivocation being done in the debate about the autocopy theory, at least as currently formulated. The algorithm described is highly specific and nuanced, the way computer programs are and need to be. But the computer program is supposed to be a model for an analog process that occurred inside the head of a medieval human being, probably somewhat unconsciously. The debate inevitably goes something like this:

• Attacker: "A medieval person could not have formulated or followed those directions."
  
• Defender: "Those directions are just a loose guide. The scribe had a lot of freedom to interpret the directions, and didn't necessarily interpret them exactly that way."
  

Fair enough. But what is the sine qua non of the autocopy process, then? What general behaviors must be present, in some way, for the process to count as true autocopying? And then, what evidence do those core behaviors leave in the pseudo-text outputted, that distinguishes it from pseudo-text (or real text) that was generated a wholly different way? Autocopying defined too broadly becomes meaningless, no pun intended. Autocopying loses utility as a concept — becoming dangerously close to a truism — when it can be stretched to cover pretty much any not-understood pattern that looks like language and contains internal repeating patterns.

Rene, I'm also inclined to think that if the VMs is meaningless and was stochastically generated, its writer(s) used dice, spinning volvelles, or drawing lots to generate the vords. Possibly in combination with autocopying, since analog random event generation is slow. But how much of each? For what parts? And how would we know?