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

[quimqu]

Thanks @Mauro. About the horseshoe: yes, it’s a bit like ordering books by height. The arc is real, but it shows how the hands and sections differ, not the order the pages were written in. My text has no time order at all and still makes the arc.

About the LSA: you actually had it right. If you reorder the bifolios to make neighbouring pages as similar as possible, the score goes up a lot, and it goes up even more in my text than in the real one. If you try every possible order and keep the best, it always looks better than what you started with. So that gain doesn’t show the order was wrong.

About the 1/720: I tried it. I put the bifolios in order with Lisa’s method and with npcompl33t’s measure, on quires 1–7, 13 and 20. The two methods don’t agree with each other, neither on the real text nor on mine. So your odds look fair, but then I can’t reproduce the match either. @npcompl33t, how did you get your order for Q13 and Q20, and which of Lisa’s orders are you comparing with? With both sequences I could test it on my text.