(13-09-2025, 11:27 AM)Jorge_Stolfi wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.But surely the percentage of Voynich words was higher than 70% at the beginning (when it was mostly copies of fragments of the seed line) and less than 70% near the end (where most words were the result of multiple mutation steps). And the percentage must have been decreasing; unless the mutation procedure was complicated and finely tuned as per above.This argument seems fallacious: the space of results grows like a tree, so divergence from a specific outcome is expected - what should be compared is the size of the resulting result space, which can be estimated by running the algorithm using different seeds and compare their pair-wise difference. That way, you get an estimate of the variation in results space depending on parameter space.
In other words the algorithm doesn't purport to be able to generate an infinite amount of Voynich-like manuscripts, nor always giving a great match to Voynich. It just allows a voynich-length output that looks similar enough, indicating that generation of it using a similar method is plausible. In other words, if the Voynich lies in the results space, then there could have been a seed (perhaps even now lost!) that generated it.
An interesting question is if the algorithm's result space is too wide to be plausible: a thousand monkeys on a typewriter will eventually generate anything, including Voynich, and that doesn't make it a plausible algorithm for generating Voynich. But the algorithm in Timm's article is pretty basic and simple and retaining the characteristics of the initial seed for the length of the VMS, so I expect the result space (at the level of Voynich length, that is) to be comparatively narrow, similar to the "gibberish after all?" article from the Voynich conference.
Also, the used algorithm for Voynichese is described in Timm's published article so I'm not sure why you keep asking how 'tuned' it is...