Bit-level Geometry: A deterministic discovery of Voynichese building blocks

[Mauro]

I used Huffman codes to compress the text

Entropy gives you a theoretical number of bits, it's better for any purpose other than actual compression (like estimating the amount of information). With Huffman codes that are actual sequences of bits (not fractions) performance is a little worse (more bits).

I used Huffmann codes only because they're demonstrably optimal (given a certain 'chunkification' of a certain text), so I fancied it could be a sound baseline. It's actually very much anachronistic in the VMS context. If, and I stress 'if', VMS word types are actually composed from a number of chunks, trying to identify them by computing Nbits over a Huffman-coded compression is probably not going to work well, but yet again, who knows. It did not work for me (with the added caveat of the supervising slot grammar, which limits what the compressor can do, a problem which does not apply to Minimum Description Length).