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

[Dunsel]

Let's look at some of the things I've had to consider and would also have to be considered in your model.

• Current line position - Where are we on the line?  Do we need a gallows token here?
  
• Current page position - Do we need to create a new paragraph?  Does this need to be a short line to precede a paragraph on the next line?
  
• Selected source token - Which of those 20 words are we going to choose?  Or, are we going to choose a word on the page we just wrote?
  
• Selected mutation type - Are we going to copy the word or mutate it?  We need a probability.
  
• Copy vs mutate probability - What percentage of words are copied and which are modified?
  
• Glyph insertion/deletion weights - When a word is chosen to modify, what letter can be deleted?  What letter can be inserted or swapped for another.  
  
• Length-preservation bias - When we mutate, do we need to keep the same word length or can we shorten or lengthen it?
  
• Repeat-nearby-family bias - Do we need to make this word look like another word we just wrote down?
  
• Avoid-too-many-new-forms bias - Have we used a word and it's mutation too many times already. Do we need to find a new word? 
  
• Proposed token - Ok, we have chosen the word and we're ready to write it.
  
• Rejection reason - Does the word look stupid? Does it have 4 vowels? 5 consonants? Have we repeated the word 4 times?  Does it look like a possible word with vowels and consonants?  Accept or reject and start over.
  

All of those rules, you could look at the page and know almost instantly how to proceed.  Software needs numbers. Weights, probabilities. So could your proposed method be modelled?  Yes.  Would this be easy?  Oh, I can say for certain it would not.

Ok, we can add the line/page relative/absolute position, this sounds reasonable. 

As for the rest of the list, mostly it's ok, except the generic "Does the word look stupid?" and also "Have we used a word and it's mutation too many times already." - absolutely not. I don't think we can expect the scribes to keep the tally of all the words they have written. If some word occurs 2-3 times in the sample of 20 tokens, it can be excluded of course, otherwise it's unreasonable to expect the scribe to keep the count of all the tokens used.

No, I meeeeeeannnnnnnnnnnn youu youu youu youu youu need to youu need to make surrreeee it doesn't look stupid.  A 'method' I have of filtering out bad words. And trust me, you don't do that and you will get garbage.  My method is a 5 word moving window.  It looks at the last 5 words to make sure it's not doing too many duplicate words.  It looks at consonant and vowel positions in the words to make sure too many letters or vowels or consonants are not being repeated.  The Voynich is surprisingly pronouncable because it does have letters that act and look like vowels and consonants.  Again, these are all human doable.  You can't just tell a piece of code to not make these words look stupid.  It needs numbers.