[split] The Zipf law and the Voynich Manuscript

[Jorge_Stolfi]

As a humanities scholar, I would never dare challenge someone who knows how to use mathematical formulas. That's why I asked ChatGPT. Artificial Intelligence will never be able to solve the Voynich, but I do trust it to solve mathematical problems.

As a computer science scholar, I must warn you that you should trust ChatGPT (or any other "AI" software) on math even less than on humanities questions.

Those Large Language Models (LLMs) have no intelligence to speak of.  They can evaluate simple algebraic formulas with your numbers; but to decide which formulas they should use they only search their collection of billions (literally) of texts scraped from the internet for words that match your query, and use whatever formula comes up the most in the accompanying solutions.  

To see how badly that approach may fail, check You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..  

The result I got is not a little lower than 1/n, but 0.5, 0.6/n, which results in a semi-flat curve.

Not sure what you mean by this, but Zipf's law says that the frequency is proportional to 1/n, not equal to 1/n.  In fact the constant depends on the size of the sample, even for the same language and text.  So, if the numbers you got are 0.6/n, they still satisfy Zip'f law.  

I asked if the result was consistent with Zipf's law and it replied that the Voynich script is a structured system but not comparable to a natural language.

Again, for this kind of question the LLMs will search their database of scraped texts for similar questions, and summarize was seems to be the majority answer in them, possibly weighted by some source reputation index -- without any check of whether it makes sense or not.  So if enough articles out there say "Voynichese is not natural language", that is what ChatGPT will say.

I just watched a video on YouTube where a doctor reported the first person murdered by ChatGPT.  The poor guy had seen several "health influencers" on YouTube claim that it was not the sodium that made salt bad, but the chloride. So he asked ChatGPT what could be a replacement for chloride, and that autogenius explained that bromide is similar to chloride and can replace it for most purposes.  And so the guy bought sodium bromide from some chemical supplier and used it instead of salt on his food, until the sad end.

All the best, --jorge