Solutions-R-US

["John Grove" <John@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I've kept quiet on the discussion regarding Big Jim's views up to this point
for several reasons. I suppose the most of which is that no one is going to
convince him he's incorrect in a number of his assumptions because he is far
too passionately engrossed in being the only one to be able to 'see' the
solution.

Dana F. Scott's last note, however kindly written, stated that Big Jim
doesn't have to convince anyone but himself that his method of decryption is
correct. He's already convinced himself beyond any reason. All constructive
criticisms that have been brought forward are either not responded to - or
responded to with extremely weak counterpoints - usually just Big Jim's
opinion that he is so right, and it is so evident, and so clear, and so easy
to follow his method. To arrive at a solution for this puzzle - you will
have to have an approach that a number of the list members would be able to
follow and arrive at similar independant translations of various pages. It
isn't that we are TRYING to debunk a solution without giving it a chance,
we're trying to comprehend how we could possibly follow the same 'rules' and
arrive at the same translation.

We can't. Simply because FACHYS could be divided up into five characters
F.A.CH.Y.S and thus five words of our individual choosing, or we could make
combinations that could lead to a number of other words. with 5 characters,
I believe there are about 5040 possible combinations of letters (it might be
less than that since we're trying to keep the characters in the order they
are in), but it still leaves far too many choices for each individual
applying their own random decision.

Big Jim asked 'Why hasn't anyone solved it yet' as a rhetorical question to
explain how obvious it is that we've missed the point by not approaching
this on a different level of understanding. The real answer to the question
is that no one has found a key yet - Perhaps, we'd still be trying to
decipher Egyptian Heiroglyphics if not for the Rosetta Stone being
discovered.

A few hundred years ago someone might well have said 'I can read the
Egyptian Hieroglyphics' and announce that it is a visual encryption system
that only they could translate - It wouldn't have been accepted either.

Truthfully, I thought Big Jim was actually a longstanding member of the list
playing a silly joke on the rest of us. My apologies to both that member and
to Big Jim for not recognizing the seriousness of his efforts very quickly.
I certainly agree with Big Jim that we may indeed be looking at this from
the wrong angle - but so is he. I'm willing to keep looking at it from my
own odd angles as well as trying to grasp the viewpoints of anyone on this
list.

Anyone who claims they have made a major discovery will get a number of
questions about their method thrown at them, BigJim. It isn't necessarily
criticism - it's the fact that there are problems that others are having
trying to 'duplicate' your method because to all of us - there are far too
many choices to be made with each letter-to-word or letters-to-word
translations in your system. If you look at John Stojko's solution you'll
see the same problem. Too many choices means no one else could come up with
the same translation of the same page - ever!

John