Writing a fake Voynich by rules: copies, habits and the link between words

[quimqu]

Hello @quimqu, it's always a pleasure to hear from you, interesting food for thoughts as always.

Among the battery of tests, did you include the standard ones (entropies, distributions...). I also remember you had developed some methods which explored the long range structure of text (I can't find the reference now, I remember you compared the VMS to many different texts). Did you try that too?

Some of them, yes, and I just ran the rest on the scribe's text (real vs scribe, average of 5 runs):

Character entropy h1: 3.88 vs 3.86
Conditional entropy h2: 2.12 vs 2.09, h3: 1.85 vs 1.84
Zipf slope: 1.00 vs 1.00

Word length distribution is close but not right: the scribe makes too many words of 2-3 glyphs and too few of 5-6.

Long range is where it fails. In the real text, neighbouring pages share more vocabulary (0.35 cosine, falling to 0.17 at 100 pages apart) and frequent words come in bursts. The scribe is too uniform (0.29 falling only to 0.19), because it only copies within the page. So there is some drift across pages that my rules don't capture yet. Good catch!