Aanother statistical take on Voynichese

[JoeyB]

Nice, thanks for sharing all of that esp. the githib repo. FWIW, when I have played with Claude in past I watched it talk itself out of the markov-4 story when I pressed it with two things: first, it basically broke wqhen I forced it to adversarially explain Tavie's vertical impact effect. That thread is active again now but its basically that the first glyph of a line is conditioned on the first glyph of the line above it and it avoids repeating that glyph (and then there's directed transitions right, o->q, y->o, etc). But the left to right character chain Claude is proposing has no page in it, the models I played with didnt have a variable for "look at the line above" and it was only checking reading order. Tavie's work and the threads on this were gold for beating up the linear model.

Second thing I had trouble with was figuring out if the model was really finding coupling or was just memorizing. Claude got very excited that it had reproduced coupling early but then it would turn out it was just handing the samples back, IIRC the threads on generators and held-out vocabulary were super helpful in pressing this point.

Good luck!