Proposed Manuscript Chronology

[quimqu]

Hi @npcompl33t, thanks for publishing the data and the reproduce script. It made it easy to check this properly.

I ran your exact pipeline on the text of my skribe. First I checked I get your numbers on the real text (they matched) then on the skribe's one. Just to summarize what the skriba does: writes with fixed tables per hand × section, a random habit per sheet, and no time, drift or production order.

1. The horseshoe appears without time. The skribe gives aprox the same arch (0.27 vs 0.36 real), the W in MDS3 (0.44 vs 0.34) and the same section order on MDS1: Herbal A, Pharma, Astro, Herbal B, Stars, Text only, Bio. It also passes your triple test, more cleanly than the real text (1.7 vs 4 failing triples out of 35). It still does all this with the sheet habit turned off. So the horseshoe shows that the sections sit on an A→B continuum. It can’t tell us that the order is time.

2. The bifolio effect is real. Within Herbal A (hand 1), pages of the same sheet keep 13.5% of the MDS1 variance, against 75% if you shuffle pages between sheets of the same hand and section. My scribe only got there once I gave each sheet a stronger random session state. With that, it reaches 0.21 vs 0.18 without losing anything else, so a coherent sheet doesn’t need time either.

One caveat on the 2.3% figure: shuffling pages between sheets of the same hand and section already gives about 5%. So more than half of that tightness comes from the section, not from the sheet.

3. Your Herbal A batches are real. Ordering the 24 hand-1 sheets by the shortest path, your Golf codes come out in blocks: 2a · 1.5a · 1a · 1b. There is no order inside each block. But I couldn’t show that this is a chronology. I also built skribe texts with a known drift, one going gradually from the Herbal A table to the Pharma table and one in four steps. The path test did not pick up either of them. With 24 sheets, this kind of distance just can’t tell drift in time apart from batches.

So my oppinion about these results is: sheets and batches yes, we agree, horseshoe as proof of time, no. For me, the order of the sections and of the batches is still an open question.