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

[quimqu]

But their results agree, this is what is interesting (quimqu's results instead do not agree with npcompl33t, not sure about Lisa's).

Mauro, just to be clear: I’m not saying I don’t see what npcompl33t sees. It’s the opposite. I see the same changes and the same horseshoe, and my skribe makes them too. The skribe is a dumb machine that writes by rules, with no meaning and no time order: it only copies the writing style of each hand and section. Even so, its text gives almost the same arc. To me that is the point. If a text with no chronology at all reproduces the arc, then the arc doesn’t need time to exist.

So I agree there are changes. Where I disagree is in reading them as time. Everything I’ve tested points to styles: the arc follows the hands and the subjects, and inside a single hand there’s very little left that follows the folio order (Q20 is the only case worth a closer look). On the hands themselves, I lean towards Lisa: different scribes, not one scribe at different moments. She is a palaeographer and has looked at the hands closely, and I think her judgement carries weight here. Either way, I don’t see a basis for calling the arc chronological.

I just trained a GRU to write voynich, like the one in the article from the other day Torsten shared. I did not give it any information about section, hand , gradients, or anything else.

Yet when i feed it words from specific sections, i found I can train a simple linear model on the GRU's internal memory, and predict where on the gradient it is within about 12%. So it is learning information about the gradient, beyond section (Herbal A is about 40% of the entire curve), even though I'm not explicitly giving it that information.

I ran npcompl33t’s new code (unlabelled, one point per bifolio) on my text, which has no order at all, five times. The overall order it finds for the whole manuscript is almost the same in my text as in the real one (rank correlation 0.86–0.92), so that order needs no chronology. In Q13 it finds an order in my text that is more “secure” than in the real one (0.65–0.76 against 0.54). Only in Q20 is the real text more stable than all five of my runs (0.95 against 0.59–0.89), though two of them come close. So Q20 may hold something my skribe doesn’t make, and that is worth a closer look, but I don’t see it as evidence of time.