Deconstructing the VMS : A positionless ledger (part 1)

[Dunsel]

Sorry, I think this gets to the heart of the matter here. What is the null hypothesis you're hoping to reject? And perhaps this will be clearer from your answer to that, but how does it inform your experiment design?

The null hypothesis is that the ledger is just another way of describing the known local patterns in Voynichese and has no real predictive power.

The test is simple: build the ledger from one body of text, freeze it, and test it on material that did not create it. In my testing, I built the ledger using only Scribe 1 and then tested how well that frozen ledger could reproduce text attributed to Scribes 2–5.  If it can reproduce unseen material to a relatively high degree, then the null starts to fail.

Foreshadowing: it does fail. It's not a spectacular failure but I think I can explain why.

I’ll cover that in detail in a later post. As I said, I’ve done a ridiculous amount of work on this, and there’s far too much to cram into one post.