(13-03-2026, 07:57 PM)magnesium wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Assuming that each gibberish-writing session was the length of a full class at Yale, which would be either 50 or 75 minutes, then we're looking at 11-17 seconds per token, on average, or roughly 120-180 hours for a full VMS-length text. If the writing session were less time, then the time spent estimates would decrease accordingly.I would imagine the gibberish-writing session was not during the class, but adjacent to it, as the paper describes the authors of these documents as 'volunteers.' But from the words of one of the authors on this forum, the exercise lasted long enough that some people found it interminably boring (while others found it immensely enjoyable and like doodling... people are weird, man), so it probably was at least in the area of 30 minutes. Unfortunately, I can't find a specific reference to the given time.
People writing gibberish would likely also get faster at it: the exercise in the paper originally also required them to 'invent' a method by which they were gonna generate their text. So I think this initial speed is a decent comparison point.
Thank you for your perspective on the Naibbe cypher time of creation; inferring from a 30 minute session for gibberish that means it takes roughly 4 times longer to make enciphered text. That's still much faster than I would have expected (and makes enciphered text more likely than before your answer, in my mind), though on the other hand still comparatively a lot more work. Of course, an enciphered text would also require an underlying message to be composed, but as we have no clue what the message in Voynich could be it's hard to even speculate on how long that would take.