A One-Page Ledger Method for Generating Voynich-Like Text

[Dunsel]

I can create this post by taking the right words and word parts from your post, but this doesn't mean this is what I did. Does your research show evidence that the Voynich MS can be created using copy and mutate or does it show evidence that the manuscript must have been created this way?

Not that it MUST have been created this way. No. I’m making no claims that this definitively explains the Voynich. What I’m saying is that the manuscript can be reverse engineered into this kind of process, and the results are strong enough that I think it deserves serious consideration as a production method.

I’m not just visually imitating Voynich words. I built an analyzer first, then used the behavior it discovered to build a generator. That generator now reproduces a fair number of Scribe 1 statistical and structural behaviors. Not all of them by any means, but enough that the model is at least plausible. And honestly, if this IS close to the real method, I suspect reproducing the exact Voynich would be impossible anyway. Once you start trying to model human production behavior in Python, you quickly discover how messy humans actually are.

Also, this currently works best for Scribe 1. Scribe 2 is much harder.
The same general approach still partially works on Scribe 2, but Scribe 2 does not collapse neatly into the same compact 1–2 sheet packet structure that Scribe 1 does. That tells me one of two things:

• either Scribe 2 was produced differently,
  
• or the same basic process evolved/drifted into a more complex regime.
  

I suspect the latter, but I’m not prepared to make a strong claim on Scribe 2 yet because the reduction behavior is nowhere near as clean as Scribe 1.

But, i will say this. I believe the Voynich has LIKELY managed to remain a mystery because a LOT of research has focused on specific sections and not specific scribes.  If you look at Currier and Davis and my work on the bigram ED, they all say that the scribes had very different vocabularies and likely methods. If you mash all that together (Herbal in particular) you're shoving 2-5 methods of production together and trying to extract 1 set of results.