[Blog Post] Peter Bakker on the VMS

[MarcoP]

TLDR I think that, if we must totally discard the phonetically-written-weird-language hypothesis, these three experts are right and the Voynich manuscript is either totally meaningless or undecipherable.

Their calculations are (from a summary reading) based on a brute force approach, for two specific cases. Brute force can usually be avoided by doing something more clever.

Hi Rene,
the calculations I posted are my own. They are certainly based on brute force and do not assume anything clever. I just wanted to point out that the search space is huge: my feeling is that one is going to fall into local minima, maybe better than those found by Yokubinas, Cheshire, Ardic &C, but still inconclusive.

Many of the statistics we already have are making both specific cases rather unlikely.

I am not sure you mean what I hope you mean Please be more specific.

The lack of repeating strings remains an interesting problem that has not yet been addressed very deeply. A verbose encryption with some degree of freedom would explain this anomaly easily, and explain why all previous attempts have failed. (Just one example).

I don't know how a verbose cipher could be efficiently explored: there are so many possible options that I wouldn't know where to start. People at Google obviously are more qualified for something like that, but they don't sound too optimistic.

As I said, one of the prominent things to explain is why the most frequent word is reduplicated. I am still not aware of any possible explanation for that, but meaninglessness (at least of daiin, but then possibly of everything else?).