A new article published today by Celler Presse compares two independently developed approaches to the structure of the Voynich Manuscript.
Tobias Franke's "Functional Decoding Model" approaches the manuscript from a semantic-functional perspective, while my experimental model approaches it from the opposite direction: as a rule-based mechanical generation system, without assuming a translation or semantic meaning.
The comparison examines whether structures identified independently by the two approaches correspond to each other, including recurring word families, positional patterns and permitted transitions.
My model currently uses 19 states and 87 permitted transitions. In page-wise cross-validation it covered 92.84% of observed Voynich transitions, compared with 67.63% for a Latin control corpus under the same procedure.
I do not consider this a decipherment or proof of a historical mechanism. The purpose of the model is to formulate a testable and falsifiable hypothesis about how some of the manuscript's textual regularities might have been generated.
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I would especially welcome criticism of the methodology and suggestions for independent tests.