[Blog Post] Was the Voynich text generated by using the self-citation-method?

[RenegadeHealer]

I still have great difficulty imagining someone writing a 200+ page manuscript (including illustrations) without the text having any informational content whatsoever. To demonstrate that such a thing is possible, the author would probably have been satisfied with a much less comprehensive work.

I am not saying that Timm's solution is not possible, but just because it cannot be refuted does not make it indisputably correct.

Of course not. It’s a very hard theory to test reliably, and either rule in or rule out. What this means is, until/ unless someone proffers a meaningful decryption of the manuscript, the stochastically generated nonsense hypothesis will likely always remain on the table. But, by the same token, the continued viability of this hypothesis will likely never be enough to rule out or deter speculation about meaningful information in the VMs text.

If someone were motivated by the prospect of much money or prestige, I could imagine him breaking up this stochastic pseudo-text generation task into small daily chunks — a folio or two per day, perhaps — and quitting for the day when the task became too mentally taxing or inefficient. Of course, the same could be said about encoding real information using a novel and repetitive encryption method.

I’d be especially interested in seeing how the diversity of glyphs, ngrams, and both types and tokens changes in each of Bowern’s students’ specimens, from beginning to end, as the tedium of the task increased. Then seeing these metrics compared to similar-sized specimens of the VMs text. If evidence of a similar statistical pattern to this “faking fatigue” were found cyclically in the VMs, then I would have to agree that Bowern’s experiment not only failed to falsify Timm’s hypothesis, but unwittingly supported it.