25-10-2025, 09:50 PM
(25-10-2025, 06:43 PM)Rafal wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.So my question is - are these actually good measures if text is meaningful or gibberish? What do they actually measure?
Exactly as RadioFM answered you, Torsten Timm’s text is not random. It has rules to be generated, so it’s mechanical but structured. That’s why it shows a similar behavior to Voynich: both are internally consistent systems with regular patterns, not chaos.
To check this, I also added a shuffled version of the Culpeper text (same words, totally random order). You can see it on the plot (bottom right corner) with the lowest modularity and the highest entropy. That’s what true randomness looks like: no community structure and full unpredictability.
So, what these measures capture is structure vs. freedom, not meaning. They tell us how organized the text is, not whether it says something understandable. Meaningful human language can appear anywhere along that scale, depending on style, genre, and even spelling conventions.
The interesting part is that Voynich and Timm both land in the middle zone, far from random, but not as rigid as scholastic Latin or as free as prose. That’s what makes it so tricky: it behaves like language, but not quite like any known one.

