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

[oshfdk]

In my paper and in this forum I believe I have further developed the work of Timm & Schinner and provided explanations for the following:

I think you may have missed my last reply because it was at the bottom of a page, but I'd also like to say here a bit about why I personally don't find this research direction interesting (I'm talking about my perspective only) in the context of Timm & Schinner.

There are two different aspects of Timm & Schinner work for me:

1) The finding that some of the features of the manuscript can be explained by the process of copying and mutating past word forms. 

2) Attempts to build a text-generator that produces Voynich-like text via copying and mutating.

I find the first one very interesting, especially when considering the manuscript as a ciphertext.

Copy and mutate can be an essential optimization when using certain cipher types for longer texts. For example, consider a homophonic substitution with nulls. If there is a need to repeat a plaintext phrase or word combination used previously, it can be both easier and more secure to just copy it over from already prepared ciphertext while changing a few homophonic assignments and rearranging/replacing the nulls. This way you don't have to focus on remembering all character assignments and at the same time you make sure that the ciphertext in two locations differs significantly enough, to avoid creating two identical pieces of ciphertext that could compromise the cipher. If your draft is the ciphertext written directly under the plaintext, finding already encoded words and word combinations and copying them over with homophonic/null adjustments is arguably the fastest way to encode large texts. A substantial portion of text can be enciphered this way. If I wanted to encipher this post, each time I had to write "ciphertext" I would just look up the previous place where I wrote "ciphertext", then I would change a couple of letters to other homophones, add/discard a null or two and write it down. Because of this possible scenario, I have a lot of interest for the autocitation research that focuses on the individual potentially verifiable examples of the autocitation.

However, I consider the second part, complete text generation by copy and mutate as the primary method, to be a dead end, for the reasons I explained in my previous posts: even if the manuscript is meaningless and not a cipher and was indeed generated using copy and mutate, it's overwhelmingly likely there will never be a conclusive way of proving this or finding the correct set of rules.