Re: On the word length distribution

[Derek Bell <debell@xxxxxx>]

Jorge Stolfi wrote:
> If I read the clue correctly, the ball is back in the cryptographers'
> court. Have a busy holiday week! (But hurry: the Millenium is only a
> week away, and Revelations that are not received by the deadline may
> be rejected independently of their merit. 8-)

The first question that pops into my head is if the initial characters
in each word
follow a distribution anything like Benfords' law - in base 10, the
proportions are
given by log_10(1 + 1/d) where d = 0..9.

http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~jjh97/suprema/main_page.html
http://www.sciencenews.org/Sn_arc98/6_27_98/mathland.htm

Granted, not all data follows this distribution, but it may at least
help decide what kind
of codebook it is, if it is one.

Derek