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

[Dunsel]

Quite simply, in human terms: does the word “look right” within the current local family of forms being copied?

The whole idea of the copy-mutate system, if I understood @Torsten correctly, is to formalize the process, to be able to make testable predictions, etc. 

I see two possibilities for where copy+mutate research leads: either some well defined rule based reasonably simple copy+mutate system successfully explains most statistical properties of the text, which would mean that the scribes actually used something similar to this precise rule-based system system. Or scribes mostly relied on their intuition, visual patterns and imagination and even if the process included looking back and reusing past patterns, there will be no way of identifying the process exactly, in which case we can't really learn much from copy+mutate formalizations. Is this correct?

Correct.  The Voynich demands an explanation.  Any explanation without empirical evidence is not an explanation.  Go look at the theories and solutions threads or Youtube.  You'll find PLEANTY of explanations that lack testable proof.  The scientific method is at play here.  If you're going to make bold statements about the Voynich, you need to back it up with evidence that anyone can examine and get the same results.  The testable predictions.  So even if it is copy/mutate, there was likely a system that prevented drift and should be testable.  Which is what I think I've found.

If it is copy/mutate then perhaps we could identify the process exactly.  We could likely never reproduce the Voynich exactly and even if we could reproduce it, it would get tossed out pretty quick as being TOO good.

And we can learn a lot by looking at how the text was put together.  This is a mystery that has lasted for centuries and even been tackled by 'super computers' and learning models.  If we can figure out the method, I believe the biggest gains will be in, not just linguistics and how languages are detected, but in human psychology and how our eyeballs managed to fool some of us into thinking it was a coloring book dropped by an alien baby who's parents were on vacation to Earth.