Run · Voynich Manuscript

T40 exploratory: Herbal A decoded with learned sign boundaries, against its own words shuffled

The same kind of gap was found for the session-8 mixed key (0.18-0.27 nats per element), and content-free generators gave 0.00-0.02 there. Shuffling removes the edge dependency and line layer as well as any content, so the gap can come from structure without meaning. The sharper null for next time is the fitted generator run on shuffled Latin words, which keeps the cipher's structure and removes the plaintext's order.

Exploratory, not a reading: the real word order beats its shuffle by 0.26 nats per element, but the decoded text is not Latin ('iumu ae s io s e i nea n un a li d uee u uei i u n tu e n ti oru u') and the pipeline fails its control at this rungHerbal A -2.563 / 0.296; shuffled -2.824 / 0.2160

Result

Run	Measured	Result	Against	Decision	Date
Run	Held-out element-trigram score (nats per element; Latin's own -2.418) / dictionary coverage of the decoded held-out text	Herbal A -2.563 / 0.296; shuffled -2.824 / 0.216	Planted control under the same rung-B pipeline: -2.767 / 0.271 (true plaintext 0.697)	Exploratory, not a reading: the real word order beats its shuffle by 0.26 nats per element, but the decoded text is not Latin ('iumu ae s io s e i nea n un a li d uee u uei i u n tu e n ti oru u') and the pipeline fails its control at this rung

What it used and found

Crack attempt on Herbal A under the fitted period-cipher setting

Method

MTH

Latin genre texts

Dataset

DAT

ZL3b transcription

Dataset

DAT

Latin as a re-spaced homophonic stream (period practices)

Answer it tests

ANS

Parameters

null = the section's words shuffled across its pages (seed 5), setting = best Herbal A setting (as rung A), iterations = 300000, segmentation = {'V': 200, 'rounds': 3, 'max_len': 3}

Cite it

Mysteries Department. (2026). T40 exploratory: Herbal A decoded with learned sign boundaries, against its own words shuffled [Run RUN0DCBGWKQ4KGM]. https://mysteriesdept.com/r/RUN0DCBGWKQ4KGM

@misc{mysteriesdept_run0dcbgwkq4kgm,
  title     = {T40 exploratory: Herbal A decoded with learned sign boundaries, against its own words shuffled},
  author    = {{Mysteries Department}},
  year      = {2026},
  note      = {Run, catalog key RUN0DCBGWKQ4KGM},
  url       = {https://mysteriesdept.com/r/RUN0DCBGWKQ4KGM}
}