More rigorously testing the hoax hypothesis

[degaskell]

The two general approaches outlined above (MATTR and vocabulary-matching) seem promising, but I think they both suffer from the problem that they are fundamentally measures of structure rather than measures of meaning. It's easy enough to take structure as a reasonably proxy for meaning, but as our experiments show, it is quite possible for a text to be both structured and meaningless. To put it another way, it is not much use to test whether the Voynich more closely resembles natural language or randomly scrambled language, because we already know that the Voynich is neither natural language nor pure randomness. What we need is to determine what kinds of structure are unique to meaningful texts and cannot easily be reproduced in human-produced gibberish.

Looking at the MATTR profiles of longer gibberish documents might be helpful here; I'll have to think more about this.