Strong evidence of a structured four-phase system in the Voynich Manuscript

[Urtx13]

Not to mention that patterns like this don’t appear naturally or by chance.

If such a structured cycle exists, it means someone intentionally designed it — which implies purpose, not randomness.

For me personally this doesn't work as a good argument. Patterns appear by chance all the time. And even when they don't appear by chance, they can appear due to factors other than purpose. For example, there can be differences in how a page was structured based on where in a quire it appears, which could produce cyclical features. Another very simple example, if adjacent pages refer to one another by using words like "on the right page" and "on the left page", then recto and verso pages will have slightly different vocabulary. If this is consistently used across the whole MS, an ML model can easily pick this up.

Also, does your method account for the possibility that the folios of the manuscript are not presently in their original order?

classification_predictions.csv

The file shows that the model can accurately predict which of the four phases a folio belongs to, with an accuracy of over 96%. That would be impossible if there were no internal cycle to detect.

I've tried running the model again with seed 2025 (by running perl -pi -e 's/1405/2025/g' *.py) and compared classification_predictions.csv. In both cases there are apparent cycles, but they don't appear to match (even if we remapped the phases), is this expected?

Thanks for your comment. You’re right that patterns can appear by chance or due to layout. That’s why we explicitly tested for it.

We didn’t just find a pattern. We showed that only one configuration (seed = 1405) produces a coherent semantic structure with high accuracy, low autocorrelation, and alignment with independent data. All control runs (random seeds, permutations, folio reordering, no-angle tests, etc.) fail to reproduce it. So this isn’t about “patterns happen” — this is about patterns that don’t happen under any other configuration.

We also checked within individual folios, to rule out recto/verso or binding effects. The structure persists locally.

So yes — skepticism is healthy. But science advances by testing, not guessing. We’ve tested. The result holds.

Happy to show plots or share code if helpful.