Re: Hoaxes (was Re: Voynich research needs)

[Jim Gillogly <jim@xxxxxxx>]

Daniel Harms wrote:
> 
> At 11:05 PM 8/25/2000 +0200, you wrote:
> 
> >I am pretty sure that most of us have a different
> >understanding of what constitutes a hoax. If it dates from
> >a more recent time than it appears to, then I consider it
> >to be a hoax. But if it dates from 1470 (give or take a
> >couple of decades, being generous), when should we call it
> >a hoax?
> 
> I wouldn't call it a hoax, necessarily, in either case.  To judge whether
> something is a "hoax", we have to have some indication as to what
> motivated its creation.

I exhibited some strong evidence that the Beale Ciphers are
a hoax in a paper for Cryptologia in 1980.  The demonstration
didn't give any indication of the motivation for the hoax, but
was nevertheless convincing -- to most people without a stake
in the ciphers' legitimacy, anyway.  It consisted of showing that
long monotonic alphabetic strings appeared when a fairly obvious
"decryption" was performed on the unknown part of the cipher.

I would call it a hoax if it turned out to be provable nonsense:
it's still an old manuscript, but it's presented as an herbal or
other scientific treatise, so that kind of content would indicate
that somebody constructed it to con someone else for some reason.
Being able to prove something is nonsense is rather rare in
cryptography -- normally you can either break it or not, but
without being able to prove there's no solution.  If a really
simple model for the text were found (e.g. a finite-state automaton
with not too many states and symbols) that produced precisely
the Voynich text or even a single page of it, that would be an
indication that it was constructed according to a table or formula,
and did not have a lot of semantic content.

I don't really expect us to find such an automaton, and in fact
I suspect the work already done on Hidden Markov Models for the VMs
would turn up many of the consistencies one would expect from this
type of construction.
-- 
	Jim Gillogly
	4 Halimath S.R. 2000, 02:42
	12.19.7.8.18, 13 Edznab 1 Mol, Seventh Lord of Night