Deconstructing the VMS : A positionless ledger (part 1)

[Dunsel]

These do not seem like mutually exclusive conditions to me---and perhaps more to the point, you need to show that they are mutually exclusive---and so I don't believe you can hinge falsifiability on them. There is no inherent tradeoff in the ability of one model "to reproduce unseen material" and another to do the same. In fact, a significant problem with Voynichese studies is that many models capture at least some of the features reasonably well, so tests distinguishing them must be carefully undertaken and the tests for that thoroughly justified.

What it seems like you've tested is whether or not this model manages to reproduce key features of texts not in its sample set without reference to any other model. This is fine to its limits, but from what I can see, I agree with the point that it has mostly reproduced features from other models rather than ruling them out.

There are really four basic claims that I could make:

1. Does the ledger predict material it was not built from? Yes. A ledger built from scribe 1 core material reproduces a high proportion of core text from Scribes 2–5.  I'll provide that result in a later post.
   
2. Does the organization of the ledger capture something beyond bigram statistics? I'm not sure yet. When I preserve the actual scribe 1 bigrams and randomize them, most of the predictive power remains. So I can't show that and won't make that claim.
   
3. Did the scribes actually use something like this to construct words? The copy and mutate results are consistent with that idea, but they don't prove it. So, I won't make that claim and I think it would be difficult to prove it if I did. What I can say is that, if a ledger like this were being used, the procedure itself would be mechanically quite simple: copy a word, change one atom according to the available transitions in the ledger, and continue.
   
4. Does the ledger represent a physical device? Other than a basic sheet of paper (or vellum), I have no evidence for that either. I have considered that some wheel or grille type device may have been used and there's some very crude evidence but I've yet to construct anything solid.  So, I feel safe in claiming that it could have been constructed and used as a single sheet of paper. Anything beyond that, I won't make any claim.
   

So, I don't think the ledger itself needs to “beat” every other model simply to be a valid. At the moment, I can show that it it has strong similarity to the scribes it was not built from, and I can show that the system itself is compact enough to fit on a single sheet of paper (vellum). If I were to claim anything from 2 or 3 above or if I claimed anything more than a piece of paper, then yea, I'd definitely need some solid proof and falsification.  I'm not saying that 2-4 are excluded from possibilities.  I just haven't gone down that road yet.