Editing Cracking the Voynich code 2015 (section)

==Specific tasks==

* '''Phase 1:''' Characterize the text. Write scripts that count its features. How many words? How many tokens? Word frequencies? Compare these in a table with known languages obtained by running your same code on the Declaration of Human Rights. Don't forget to get a short paragraph of English and manually count everything and then run it on your code to cross check it is counting correctly.  You must always validate your code or you will lose marks. Tabulate results for all 16 versions of the Voynich. Which Voynich tokens ''only'' appear at the start of words and which are ''only'' at the end?

* '''Phase 2:''' Investigate just using English text, how you can separate the alphabet from other ascii tokens such as &, $, (, ), +, =, 3, etc. If you were an alien without ''a priori'' knowledge, how would you do it? Characterize English text to see how token frequency, token recurrence interval, and statistics of token pairs varies between the alphabet and other characters.

Think up some of your own ideas to try out. Think up only very simple ideas. Simplicity is the key. 

* '''Phase 3:''' Investigate Linguistic Morphology. Initially started looking at determining the varying possible word stems and affixes but eventually only used basic character sequences at the start and end of words to determine 'affix' frequencies for comparisons.

* '''Phase 4:''' Illustration Investigation.

* '''Phase 5:''' Collocation Investigation. Collocations give a quantitative measure of word association. As collocations are considered to be relatively frequent in natural languages, this may be able to help determine if the Voynich is a hoax.