Re: Solutions-R-US

[Dennis <ixohoxi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

John Grove wrote:
> 
>  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.
> 
> 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.

	We don't have a Rosetta Stone for the VMs.  However,
Cretan Linear B was deciphered without a bilingual, so
it can be done.  Cretan Linear B was a "lossy" system,
too, a syllabary that was not well suited to writing
archaic Greek.

> 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.

	Athanasius Kircher, for instance.  Kircher was very
far from being stupid, too. It's been said that
Emmanuel Swedenborg was the last man to know
everything, and Kircher was the second-to-last.

> 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!

	Ah, how often we've seen this!  The claimed
decipherments can be good as folklore, but they simply
are not the truth.  The truth, as John has said, is
something that can be used by independent readers to
arrive at the same result.  

Dennis