Re: VMs: Random Text Generation

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone,

I should perhaps also mention that, in the VMS, the ligatured "4o" 
character looks (to my eyes) like an afterthought, added to the code at a 
late stage. This is because it really doesn't have the same flow or 
geometric structure as any of the other letters of the cipherbet.

My guess is that, when presented with a problem that needing solving, the 
code creator fell back on a cipher character which had proved useful in the 
past, rather than adding one within the same scheme (which, as mentioned 
here before, I think was quite possibly borrowed en masse from a shorthand 
alphabet).

I should perhaps also point out here that the cipherbet design trick of 
using rotational symmetry (like Giovanni de Fontana's vowels) wasn't 
possible, because of the unconstrained orientation of labels, and the 
existence of (a few) data columns: this meant that a design criterion of 
the VMS was that the cipherbet should be *rotation-invariant*.

So, my current (admittedly weak) inference is that EVA "4" was the last 
character added to the cipherbet, and was used to encode a certain category 
of plaintext that proved to be too unwieldy. I believe that the EVA "o" 
added to it was simply intended to try to partially hide its connection to 
the following character, but that (though we're still stumped by the rest 
of the tricks), this one didn't really fool us. Nice try, but no cigar. :-)

What do I think "4o" codes for? As I think the core of the VMS' coding 
system is likely to turn out be some kind of number code system based on 
(stego) Roman numerals, paradoxically the one thing it wouldn't have been 
very good at handling is... numbers. So: my guess is that "4o" is (in 
modern programming terms) a kind of "escape character".

In short, I suspect that "4o" + (number) --> (number), whereas (number) --> 
(dictionary entry #number). This is of course just a prediction... but it's 
certainly an intriguing possibility. :-)

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

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