28-10-2025, 05:15 PM
Well, my compliments to quimqu.
His is the most clear demonstration I've seen that long-range ('long' being up to 5 words apart in this case, if I understood correctly) interactions exist and are important for the VMS. As he says, this has been proposed and tested before, but what finally convinced me 100% is this graph, which he kindly sent me and includes a data point for a randomly shuffled VMS, where it falls quite apart from the real VMS:
After this work, the possibility that the VMS is just a mechanical random gibberish (equivalent to an order-0 or a low-order Markov chain) becomes, in my mind, (much) more improbable.
The same graph also brings me to re-evaluate Torsten Timm's work, because it's undeniable it's plotted 'near' the VMS, while its shuffled version is far away. This does not mean I fully endorse Timm's theory, because there are texts in natural languages which are near the VMS too and, imho, because it does not explain convincingly the other VMS peculiarity, the words structure, but surely it rises in plausibility.
Many other hypothesis remain in place (quimqu listed some), I won't annoy you with the n-th rehashing of a long list, but at least I see some progress.
PS.: it might be interesting to analyze some more texts in natural languages. I find it strange to see texts in the same language split into two different groups (with the Voynich in the middle). Analyzing more text/languages would clarify if this is a real feature (which would be an interesting discovery by itself, I guess) or not, and in any case better determine where the VMS stands vs. natural languages texts.
His is the most clear demonstration I've seen that long-range ('long' being up to 5 words apart in this case, if I understood correctly) interactions exist and are important for the VMS. As he says, this has been proposed and tested before, but what finally convinced me 100% is this graph, which he kindly sent me and includes a data point for a randomly shuffled VMS, where it falls quite apart from the real VMS:
After this work, the possibility that the VMS is just a mechanical random gibberish (equivalent to an order-0 or a low-order Markov chain) becomes, in my mind, (much) more improbable.
The same graph also brings me to re-evaluate Torsten Timm's work, because it's undeniable it's plotted 'near' the VMS, while its shuffled version is far away. This does not mean I fully endorse Timm's theory, because there are texts in natural languages which are near the VMS too and, imho, because it does not explain convincingly the other VMS peculiarity, the words structure, but surely it rises in plausibility.
Many other hypothesis remain in place (quimqu listed some), I won't annoy you with the n-th rehashing of a long list, but at least I see some progress.
PS.: it might be interesting to analyze some more texts in natural languages. I find it strange to see texts in the same language split into two different groups (with the Voynich in the middle). Analyzing more text/languages would clarify if this is a real feature (which would be an interesting discovery by itself, I guess) or not, and in any case better determine where the VMS stands vs. natural languages texts.
![[+]](https://www.voynich.ninja/images/collapse_collapsed.png)