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

[Jorge_Stolfi]

• You need a seed text (a "visible source") to start the process. (1)

• The modify step must respect the complex word structure. (2)

I think we can tie 1 and 2 together and say that if there is some template that all words should conform to (something like curve-line system + or one of your grammars), then 1 could be just generating a set of random seed words according to the template (seems easy, I did something like this in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. in this thread) and 2 is just making sure modifications still conform to the template.

Word templates like mine do not capture all the constraints we see in the actual Voynichese lexicon.  No matter how we define prefix, core, and suffix, these three parts are not independent.  My model specifies a couple of constraints (the counts of benches and dealers) but there are more.  Your own color tables show that, for one particular core, there are prefix-suffix pairs that are twice as common as expected, or half as common. I gave a couple of more dramatic examples of "skew squares" were Fr(AKX):Fr(BKX) is very different from Fr(AKY):Fr(BKY).

There is still no explanation for how the Author could have created words with those hidden statistical anomalies, both for the seed text and during modification.

The suggestion above does not seem to be very different from

1. Generate a lexicon of a couple thousand words with the required structure.
   
2. Create a seed text by picking among those words with a Zipf-like distrib.
   
3. Run self-copy, but instead of modifying a word, pick a similar one from the lexicon.
   

This variant would solve one of my objections by keeping the lexicon stable.  But it still does not ensure that the word frequencies would be stable and Zipfian.  And why the word-pair distribution has "skew squares".

All the best, --stolfi