Run · Voynich Manuscript

Generation 5: Herbal A decoded under the population-annealed one-sign-per-letter system (its control met the coverage bar); fails the structure-preserving null

Population-annealed EM for the lattice key, compared with independent restarts: Held-out dictionary coverage; manuscript gate: coverage(Herbal A) - mean coverage(nulls) > coverage(control) - mean coverage(nulls), and key-permutation p < 0.01 (100 permutations).

Fails the manuscript gate on both counts: Herbal A decodes below the structure-preserving null and no better than permuted keys. The control passed the coverage bar only through a degenerate solution (key 0 %), and the null decodes to more coverage than its own plaintext has, which is the reason the null gate exists. No reading.control 0.497 (bar 0.483; key 0.000, character similarity 0.062, permutation p 0.03); pseudo-Latin nulls 0.398 and 0.340 (mean 0.369; their own plaintexts 0.352, 0.346); Herbal A held-out 0.282, permuted keys mean 0.289, p 0.5840

Result

Run	Measured	Result	Against	Decision	Date
Run	Held-out dictionary coverage; manuscript gate: coverage(Herbal A) - mean coverage(nulls) > coverage(control) - mean coverage(nulls), and key-permutation p < 0.01 (100 permutations)	control 0.497 (bar 0.483; key 0.000, character similarity 0.062, permutation p 0.03); pseudo-Latin nulls 0.398 and 0.340 (mean 0.369; their own plaintexts 0.352, 0.346); Herbal A held-out 0.282, permuted keys mean 0.289, p 0.584	Control margin over the null: 0.497 - 0.369 = 0.128 · Herbal A margin: 0.282 - 0.369 = -0.087	Fails the manuscript gate on both counts: Herbal A decodes below the structure-preserving null and no better than permuted keys. The control passed the coverage bar only through a degenerate solution (key 0 %), and the null decodes to more coverage than its own plaintext has, which is the reason the null gate exists. No reading.

What it used and found

Population-annealed EM for the lattice key, compared with independent restarts

Method

MTH

Herbal A and Herbal B paragraph text: training and held-out pages

Dataset

DAT

Latin genre texts

Dataset

DAT

Naibbe cipher tables and example plaintexts (greshko/naibbe-cipher, commit 719f2f4c)

Dataset

DAT

ZL3b transcription

Dataset

DAT

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

Answer it tests

ANS

Parameters

PA = 8, pw = 0.25, BETA0 = 0.2, alpha = 0.05, settings = {'K': 50, 'h_c': 1, 'h_v': 1, 'lam': 0, 'Ssyl': 0, 'abbrev': 0, 'p_copy': 0, 'p_stay': 0.9, 'window': 5, 'novowel': 0, 'p_break': 0.5, 'spacing': 'stream', 'simplify': 1, 'positional': 0}, population = 32, permutations = 100, em_iterations = 60

Cite it

Mysteries Department. (2026). Generation 5: Herbal A decoded under the population-annealed one-sign-per-letter system (its control met the coverage bar); fails the structure-preserving null [Run RUN0DCGXS4DNN5R]. https://mysteriesdept.com/r/RUN0DCGXS4DNN5R

@misc{mysteriesdept_run0dcgxs4dnn5r,
  title     = {Generation 5: Herbal A decoded under the population-annealed one-sign-per-letter system (its control met the coverage bar); fails the structure-preserving null},
  author    = {{Mysteries Department}},
  year      = {2026},
  note      = {Run, catalog key RUN0DCGXS4DNN5R},
  url       = {https://mysteriesdept.com/r/RUN0DCGXS4DNN5R}
}