The Naibbe cipher

[magnesium]

Despite my misgivings about the possibility of AI-generated text, the underlying findings strike me as plausible enough. The finding of word-length autocorrelation was noted in Bowern and Gaskell's 2022 conference work, and in my paper last year (IIRC in Supplementary Material 1), I noted the low frequency of word reduplication within Naibbe ciphertext relative to the VMS.

At bottom, the big statistical limitation of the original Naibbe cipher is that each draw of a word (when encrypting standalone letters) or of a prefix/suffix (when encrypting letter pairs) is memoryless and independent. This was a known limitation from the beginning; I reported the absence of long-range correlations in Naibbe ciphertext for a reason. To get the VMS's long-range correlations and other observed features, there has to be some kind of memory at play when generating Voynichese tokens.