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

[Mauro]

I would like to hear a comment by @npcompl33t (I'm really not in the position of analyzing MDS graphs...). I think that if the seriation on your generated text indeed finds a horseshoe similar to Voynich's, when it shouldn't because the 'sequence' of your text is essentialy random, then this cast doubts on @npcompl33t's results (or there's something else deeper which causes this effect, I don't know). Iirc you also tested @LisaFaginDavis LSA algorithm on your text, and you found it improves the scores even more than on VMS, where it shouldn't, too. But @npcompl33t's results essentialy agreeing with @LisaFaginDavis You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. of Quires 13 and 20 would then be a massive coincidence, probabilities can use different assumptions which will lower the numbers but, face value, they are 1/720 for the exact match on the six folios of Q20 and 1/30 for the reverse match (and an inversion) on the five of Q13, so a total of 1/21600.

So I'd really like to know what's actually going on here. I hope @npcompl33t is reading us too.

Thanks Mauro,

If I am not wrong, the arc tells us that the style changes gradually across the pages, not in which order they were written. My skribe has no chronology, but each hand and section writes with its own habits, so it gets the same arc.

Yes, but if I'm not mistaken the setting of each page was random (over a baseline). So the seriation seems to reconstruct an order which never was there, similar to @Stolfi's example of ordering a shelf of books by height. Which in turn casts doubts on @npcompl33t results.

About the LSA: my text does have structure at the bifolio level, on purpose. The skribe writes the four pages of a sheet in one sitting, with the same habits. What it doesn’t have is any order between the sheets. So when LSA finds that the two halves of a bifolio go together, that’s expected, not something it shouldn’t find.

Ah okay, that's surely expected. I had understood that LSA found reorderings of bifolios which greatly increased the score between them (which would be unexpected and would cast doubts on Lisa's LSA results, just as for @npcompl33t's with his seriation algorithm).

About the 1/21600 or 1/720... I should investigate more about that...

And check if I did not make mistakes   But even half or a fourth of that, getting the same sequence just by chance would be a pretty remarkable coincidence.