Re: Hoaxes (was Re: Voynich research needs)

[Jordan Lund <lundj@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> 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.

    Just de-lurking here for a moment... it could still have semantic
content and still be a hoax. E.G. the "Necronomicon" that was published in
the early 80's which is still listed as "Occult" in most book-stores...
(for those of you that don't know, it's a fictional book of Magic invented
by H.P. Lovecraft, in the early 80's a publishing house took a bunch of
translated works from Sumer and other sources and tried to pass it off as a
mysteriously obtained "Necronomicon".)


                                            - Jordan
                                            lundj@xxxxxxxxxxxxx

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