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

[Jorge_Stolfi]

The model reproduces many surface-level statistical and positional properties of the Voynich text.

Quimqu, I see that you are taking seriously the theory by Thorsten & Timm that the VMS text was generated by some complicated random process with some kind of feedback ("copy and mutate").

Even if you don't accept my claim about the Starred Parags being a transcription of the Shennong Bencaojing (see the Chinese theory thread), I must warn you that this approach is fundamentally flawed, for at least these reasons:

• For any collection of statistical measurements (nth order letter or word frequencies, distance correlations, etc.), there is an algorithm that generates text that looks just like the VMS under those measurements.  Or just like the corpus of Shakespeare's plays. In either case, that "success" says nothing about how the original was actually created.
  
• Those "copy and mutate" gibberish theories presume that the author started with a "seed" that was a sample of Voynichese text, and used a tuned mutation procedure that was biased towards the statistics that we see.  So those theories do not explain why the text has the strange properties that we see, because they require that the author defined those properties before he started to create the book.
  
• It is mathematically impossible to prove that a string is "random", or even to present evidence that it is "probably random".  Thus any argument of statistical analysis that claims to do do that is necessarily flawed.
  

 In fact, a string that encodes the maximum possible amount of information (like a zip file or a JPEG image) will look like "random". 

The only way to show that the VMS is "meaningless" would be to find a deterministic algorithm that was much shorter than the VMS and generated exactly the same text (not just a text with similar statistics).  Then one could say that the information contents of the whole book is that short algorithm. 

That would be the case, for example if one proved that the text of the VMS is the digits of Pi encoded in a simple scheme (like a Roman number for each three decimal digits). 

That was the case of the mysterious book with large tables of letters that got John Dee totally trapped into bogus conversations with a large language model angels in a crystal ball.

All the best, --stolfi