Statistical analysis of VM (is it a hoax?)
Ok so I started looking into VM, hoping to find anything useful. My first idea was to try and find correlation between words on the page and the presented imagery. For that I've used qwen3 vl to generate two datasets (one based on strict schema following common patterns in the imagery) and also a simple keyword based list of visual objects.
Ran the correlation test, aand nothing survived the permutation checks. So seemingly there is zero correlation between text and the imagery which is our clue #1.
So next step was runnning statistical analysis for character entropy, mean word length etc.
Here some things are clearly visible:
2. Text from all five identified scribes have exact same artificial fingerprint (suggesting shared methodology).
3. Structure is sequential not positional.
So this led to a clear candidate for text generating method -> a simple markov chain. But pure markov chain characteristics turned out to be slightly different. After adding just ~0.15 chance of self citation within last 25 words the results matched perfectly.
Code, vl datasets, detailed findings can be found here: https://github.com/karolrybak/voynichese/tree/master
As for the question from the title. You'll have to answer that yourself, here's just my 2 cents.