Re: The Curse of the VMS

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 04:14 21/08/01 +0000, Jacques Guy wrote:
> Seriously now, let me repeat here what I told
> the girl from New Scientist. Our (and their)
> failure to decipher the VMS is but a dreadful
> indictment on the awful state of what calls itself
> linguistics (cryptography, on the contrary, seems
> to me a very mature field). The purpose  is not so
> much the decipherment of the VMS, as the painful,
> groping, slow discovery of the properties of
> language.

When she asked me if I thought an individual would wake up one morning with 
the answer, I replied that I thought it would probably only crack with the 
combined weight of the world on it.

But now I'm not so sure: I'm going through a period where it gets simpler 
every time I look at it.

There's a wide gulf between steganography and crypto, and I believe that 
the VMS' author(s) tried to blend the two, producing a class of text we're 
simply not used to: and this is what has deceived our modern statistical 
tools and eyes.

In some ways, all the elements in our modern crypto toolbox - letter 
analysis, patterns, cribs, pairs of letters - were known by about 1470 (cf. 
Sicco Simonetti and Leone Battista Alberti). But at the same time (as Rene 
points out), the dating looks to be pre-Trithemius and pre-Porta, which 
would argue against complex polyalphabets forming the backbone of the VMS.

I'm 99% certain now that the solution will turn out to be simpler than 
anyone dares to imagines. :-/

Cheers, .....Nick Pelling.....