The structure of the Voynich text and how it may be generated

[quimqu]

I tried to go one step further and check whether the local similarity structure actually contains any directional signal. The idea was simple. If the text is generated as a chain (A → B → C), we should be able to detect some asymmetry between past and future, or at least recover the correct order more often than chance.

I tested this in several ways. Comparing past vs future context, using weighted similarity, checking persistence of changes, and trying to reconstruct local triples.

The result is quite consistent across all tests. There is no detectable directionality in the local similarity signal.

Test	What it measures	Result	Conclusion
Past vs future (best match)	Whether tokens are closer to previous or next context	~31% past vs ~31% future	No directional bias
Weighted directional score	Same as above, but weighting by distance	~49.5% vs ~50.5%	Almost perfect symmetry
Chain reconstruction (A→B→C)	Whether real order scores better than permutations	31% real vs 26% shuffle	Very weak signal, near random
Persistence of changes	Whether edits from A→B persist in C	0.462 vs 0.459 (shuffle)	No real accumulation

Taken together, these results suggest that local similarity does not encode direction. Past and future contexts are essentially interchangeable from the point of view of form similarity.

This does not mean the text was not written sequentially. It only means that direction cannot be recovered from local edit-distance structure.

If anything, the behaviour looks more like selection within a dense space of compatible forms than a step-by-step transformation chain.