RE: VMs: VMS not Welsh? oh well....

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Rob,

At 08:44 29/01/03 +0000, Rob Hicks wrote:
> Dr Strong's papers are fascinating.  About a month ago, I took the two 
> pages he claimed to have deciphered, transcribed them, and then tried to 
> match them up with the alleged plaintext.  There is a correlation, in 
> terms of letter counts for words, between the characters in the VMS and 
> the letters of the 'plaintext'.
>
> I then looked at Strong's tables, in which the Roman alphabet is lined up 
> with several rows of voynich characters.  These tables seem to match the 
> patterns observed.
>
> So had Strong found a key? I don't think so.  It seems to me that the 
> tables were made to explain the plaintext, as opposed to the tables 
> leading to the plaintext.  If the tables were genuine, where on earth 
> would they have come from?  Remember Strong had access to only two pages 
> of the MS.

It's entirely possible that a separate key could have been encoded into 
each page (though in a way we don't currently see), so this is not quite a 
killer counter-argument against Strong.

Personally, the VMS' text has never looked polyalphabetic to me - 
polyalphas have flatter statistics and are highly unlikely to have 
sequential recurrent features (like "dain dain"), except where the length 
of the subphrase equals the number of alphabets, which isn't what Strong 
was claiming here.

In fact, when I checked through Strong's tables etc, it was the way that 
"dain" seemed to come out differently each time - please correct me if my 
memory fails me - that made me most uncomfortable. If I had only seen one 
page, then this might just be a random artefact - but having looked at the 
whole document, "dain" is almost certain to be a unit of meaning 
*independent* of the rest of the coding scheme.

Also: as I recall, the entropy of the encoded text (as a stream of 
characters) is far lower than the entropy of Strong's plaintext - to me, 
this indicates that a lot of sophisticated alphabet choosing was going on.

I do think that Strong's work was an inspired assault - but also that the 
history of the VMS shows that if you look for a thing (in this case 
polyalphabetic crypto) long enough, you'll start to see it.

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

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