How fast could a scribe write a Voynich like text?

[dexdex]

The methods devised by participants of g&b experiment can match Voynichese quite well (and seemingly better than any proposed languages),

By what criteria, and who measured them?

A simple first-order Makov chain will produce gibberish with most of the same vital statistics as the Shakespeare corpus -- Zipf plot, entropy per word, n-gram frequencies, word pair frequencies. Someone who does not know English would say that the synthetic text matches Shakespeare "quite well".  It would match it better than Agatha Christie, Nicholas Culpeper, or any other natural language text would.  

Would that suggest that Hamlet may be just gibberish? That it cannot be a natural language?

The obvious implementation of a zero-order word-based Markov would use a single table of word probabilities.  For a first-order word Markov, one would need a separate table for each word X in the lexicon, that gives the frequencies of each word Y following word X.  That would be quite large if it was complete; but if the frequencies are computed from a fixed "seed" text of N words, all those tables together will have at most N-1 entries.    

But then, instead of a table, the seed text itself can be used to represent those frequency distributions implicitly.  To generate the next word Y, you take the previous generated word X, pick a random occurrence of X in the seed text, and copy the following word.  This trick (which works for higher-order Markov chains as well) makes it possible to chose the next outout word without generating random numbers with unequal probabilities, which a scribe in the 1400s would hardly be able to do.  

Thorsten&Timm's "self-copying" method seems to be quite similar to this implementation of a Markov chain.  Except that the generated text itself is continuously appended to the seed text, and a separate (non-trivial!) algorithm is used to occasionally create new words by mutation of previous ones.  Ah, and also a time-travel routine is called initially to fetch the last page of the output (page f116r) from the future to use as the initial seed text (page f0v), which is discarded at the end.

All the best, --stolfi

I think this is straying from the topic of this thread, but this is the paper: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.