Edit-Distance computational attack idea

[Sam G]

Hi all,

So, for quite a while I've wondered why Torsten Timm's auto-copying hypothesis hasn't made a bigger splash in the Voynich community.

His theory didn't really explain anything.  He would basically just take two lines of similar text and assert that one was copied from the other.  Of course, the similarity could be for any other reason (such as similar vocabulary or grammar in a meaningful text).

the average edit distance between words in the VMS is anomalously low compared to other texts... Natural languages don't work like this.

That English or other European languages don't have this property does not prove that no natural language does.  Also, well-developed theories regarding what properties natural languages may or may not have basically do not exist.

This computational attack would settle, once and for all, that the VMS must either be a constructed language,

If you concede that a valid constructed language could have this property, then you would also need to show that such a language could not have arisen naturally.

a cipher, or gibberish.

That the VMS is not encrypted is basically proven by the low second-order entropy of the text, since virtually all ciphers increase entropy.  The main exception, verbose ciphering, is ruled out by the lack of repeated strings (no long words and no repeated sequences of short words).