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

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Well, I am not in the stage of creating a therory and testing it, I really have no clues. I am in the stage of observation, also part of the scientific method.

But you don't have to believe the theory.  In fact, the scientific method works best when you set out to check a theory that you don't.  Because then you try harder to find a good test that will disprove it.

Like, someone who believes in the LAAFU theory will naturally try to compute more statistics that reveal anomalies at the two extremities of the lines.  But someone who do not believe in the theory would think first of doing tests that show that the apparent anomalies are due to other causes.  Like the line-breaking bias.  Hence my proposed test of redoing the line breaks with different margin widths.

Thorsten recently claimed that the change from "Language A" to "Language B" is gradual, and is due to the drift that one expects from the copy-and-mutate method.   Someone who believes that claim may, for instance, look for ways to rearrange the bifolios of Herbal-A and/or Herbal-B so as to make successive pages maximally similar to each other.   And I bet that there is indeed a rearrangement that makes the transition more gradual than the current one.   But since I don't believe that theory, I am more interested in tests that could disprove it, if it is false.   Any idea?   Could your kind of analysis do that?

All the best, --stolfi