Human generated nonsense text

[ololololo]

The author could simplify his task.
Remember the Codex Seraphinianus. Luigi Serafini didn't just write some scribbles; he created a base-21 number system for them. In fact, it's much easier than writing random scribbles ((which should still look beautiful!).
And why random? It can be quite systematic, just meaningless.

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Remember the Codex Seraphinianus. Luigi Serafini didn't just write some scribbles; he created a base-21 number system for them.

IIRC, Serafini himself admitted that the page numbers are the only meaningful contents of the book. Can anyone confirm?  

The number system, by the way, was promptly cracked, back in the mailing list days, by one of the cryptographers on duty.  Can't remember who...

All the best, --stolfi

[ololololo]

The number system, by the way, was promptly cracked, back in the mailing list days, by one of the cryptographers on duty. Can't remember who...

Someone named Derzhansky (I forgot his name) and Allan Wechsler.
I mentioned this in the sense that this way you can make your work easier. You can create some kind of system that will allow you to create meaningless text, and then the process of creating this text will be much faster.
For example, the author of VMS could simplyYou are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (of course, in the thread, I deciphered the cipher as anagrams, but he could have just written numbers. The result would be the same).
It would also be interesting to conduct a statistical study of the text of the Codex Seraphinianus. It would be interesting to compare this with the text of the VMS...

[MicahDjinn]

I am sure if I have mentioned this before, but I wonder what kind of nonsense or meaningless text a human would be inclined to produce if that was their intention. I think that producing "random" or "randomish" text quickly is too computationally intensive for the human brain, our mind just don't seem to be designed to do such things easily, though of course for a computer this is trivial.(Just in the way that multiplying 2 large numbers together is hard for most people and trivial for a computer.)

It seems to me that a human trying to produce "random" or "randomish" will in fact produce text with a clear structure of pattern to it. Now this is, I suppose, an empirical statement. I suppose in principle one could asks 20 volunteers to produce 2 pages of random text using a sample of invented symbols that they were given to use and then see what the results look like. It would be interesting to see what commonality there are between the different nonsense texts that the different volunteers produced. I suppose for it to be a proper test the volunteers would have to be given some kind of time constraint to produce the 2 pages. They would also have to be forbidden from using any tools such as dice or coins in order to generate the random text. Maybe also all working would have to be done in their head i.e. with a pad to do working on.

I ask this as I hypothese that the volunteer might produce text broadly speaking structured in the kind of way the more repetitive examples of Voynich text is. Phenomena like "copying" or repeating "randomish" sections might be done in order to increase speed of text product. I wonder also if having words structured in essentially to same way, but with 1 or 2 letter differences might be a natural thing to produce.

This question interests me as I have mentioned that I think the Voynich contains a mixture of real text and nonsense. I doubt the nonsense text was generated by any mechanical means such as a cardan grille or anything else, but was just human generated.

Now I don't have 20 volunteers, so this is more of a thought experiment than a proper experiment.

I know discussion has been made of algorithms to generate Voynichese like text. I am not sure of the scope in this context for algorithms to simulate human generated text, just because simulating human behaviour is difficult and complex.(though some human behaviour is easy to model.)

A very interesting post. Did you ever use a punchcard at school, the one's with holes and placed the card over a grid of the Alphabet?