Speculative fraud hypothesis

[Torsten]

Here are some tests of your algorithm with a 14-word seed text in English (a bit longer than the one you used above). The mutation algorithm randomly deletes a letter, with increasing prob if the word is long; or inserts a letter chosen with the approximate English letter frequency, with increased prob if the word is short; or replaces a random letter by a loosely similar letter (vowel by vowel, stop by stop, sibilant by sibilant).

Keep in mind that the VMS was produced by a human scribe, not by a computer program. A 15th-century writer could not have executed an algorithm that randomly deletes or inserts letters, since neither computers nor random number generators were available to him. (Siedenote: Someone from the 15th-century wouldn't even understand the concept of randomness. The word "random" originated in Old French as randon, meaning "speed" or "force," and entered English around the early 14th century, referring to haste or violence. The modern statistical meaning, implying equal chances for all outcomes, emerged in the late 19th century.) Instead, the scribe relied on visual recognition and cognitive processes: scanning the text for source words and applying intuitive modifications. In such a context, it is far more natural to substitute glyphs with visually similar ones than to introduce or remove glyphs at random.

(This algorithm is not trivial and somewhat "tuned" to English, but I suppose that this is still considerably simpler and less "tuned" than the mutation procedure you used for Voynichese, correct?)

Our algorithm is designed to approximate how a human scribe might have carried out the self-citation method. This is necessarily more complex than a purely mechanical procedure, since it must approximate the human ability to recognize, compare, and adapt patterns. While a human scribe can intuitively judge whether two glyphs or words appear similar, a computer program requires explicit rules to determine which glyphs are considered visually similar. 

Note: Our argument is that the self-citation method could have been executed with ease by a medieval scribe, without the aid of any additional tools. We do not claim that a computer was involved in the creation of the Voynich text, nor that our computer simulation fully captures the complexity of human behavior. Rather, our aim is to demonstrate the feasibility of generating a text as rich and complex as the VMS through the strikingly simple mechanism of the self-citation method.