Need advice for testing of hypotheses related to the self-citation method

[Jorge_Stolfi]

One can only prove that a text contains no message if there is a short and deterministic program that generates the whole text verbatim, without any input, without any coin-tossing.  (And, even then, the text will still contain about as many bits of information -- "meaning" -- as are needed to code that program in some concise language.)

PPS.  A nice example of the above are the letter tables in the Book of Soyga, which Dee owned and was obsessed with.

Most of the book is about magic, kabbala, gematria, etc.  The last section has 36 tables, each a grid of 36 by 36 squares. Each square contain a single letter of the 23-letter alphabet.  On some tables letters seem to have some puzzling patterns, but overall they seem random.  For ~500 years they resisted any attempts at decipherment, and (like other "uncrackable" codes) were often claimed to be random jumbles with no meaning.

But in ~1998 eminent cryptographer and Voynichologist Jim Reeds solved the mystery.  It turns out that the contents of each table is generated by a completely deterministic algorithm, starting with a 6-leter seed word. That word and its reverse are repeated 3 times to fill the first column. Then every square in the other columns is computed by a simple formula from the two letters immediately above and to the left.  In modern jargon, the columns of the table show the evolution of the state of a 1D cellular automaton with 23 states per element. 

Thus the 36 tables together are a 36x36x36 = 46'656 letter text which is demonstrably almost meaningless: its "meaning" is only the 36 seed words (~21 bytes of information) plus the formula (say 50 bytes in some suitable machine pseudocode).

All the best, --jorge

PPPS. Re-reading Reeds paper, I found this interesting tidbit about the handwriting of the letters in the tables:

• "The writing becomes more even after the first few tables, with greatly diminished use of upper case letters, as if the copyist became accustomed to what must have been an unusually irksome and tedious task of copying completely senseless data which offered no obvious contextual clues for correcting mistakes."
  

Reminded me of a certain other "encrypted" manuscript...