RE: VMs: Time to get hands dirty

[Jacques Guy <jguy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I have lost track of who says what and who quotes whom in this
exchange, but contents is what matters, not their authors,
so....


[this one was Big Jacqueser.. Jim, I think:]>>Jacques, I have been sitting here 
quietly for two years watching what is going on. I have watched the 
combined talent of all of the members of this group attack this thing 
with every weapon in their arsenal.

[Frogguy now:] "This thing" I suppose, is John Stojko's decipherment as
Ukrainian. One of the remarkable properties of the VMs is that its
letters occur in very restricted environments. The <in> and <iin>
of <dain> and <daiin> for instance, are never found word-initially.
Gallows, as far as I know, are never found word-finally. Such things
are common in languages. Italian, for instance, allows just about
every letter of its  alphabet word-initially, but only a small subset
word-finally. Same with Spanish and Greek. That is what voided
Levitov's decipherment. He posited a dialect of Dutch as the underlying
language. But, adopting his alphabet, his decipherment yielded a variety
of Dutch without "m" at the initial of words. That alone makes it highly
suspicious and unlikely to be right. My review of Levitov's is somewhere
in the archives.

There aren't many weapons in the arsenal. If the VMs is a cipher, then
it is a cipher which _lowers_ the entropy of the text. The only cipher
that can do that (Jim Gillogly, please correct me) is a cipher that 
encodes single characters of the plain texts as sequences of characters,
or whole words and sentences. E.g. cat -> cloakarmtower (c > cloak, etc.)
Even so, the cipher has to be a bijection: c becomes cloak only and not other
words. There is another possibility: lots of nulls. It is much like
cat -> cloakarmtower, except that you are allowed any number of words
to encipher each letter _provided that_ they are built on strict, narrow
patterns. I'll take French "javanais" to illustrate this. The rule is:
insert "av" before the first vowel of every syllable. Thus: "bonjour" 
-> "bavonjavour". Modify the rule to: insert "av", or "ov", or "ugl"
and you get a cipher text with a lower entropy than the plain text.
In that case, the VMs is very short, and the labels must be ignored.
Possible, of course. But in that case, without need for further examination,
both Levitov's and Stojko's decipherment can be dismissed because they
do not posit such a cipher.

So, in order still to be allowed to keep them as possible, we must
posit that the VMs either is not a cipher, or is a cipher and one
which raises the entropy of the text. But the entropy of the VMs is
already very low. Ukrainian is close enough to Russian, I had
a paper published in Glottometrika about the entropy of Russian,
and I doubt very much that if you removed the vowels of a Russian
text, or a Ukrainian text, you'd get anywhere near the entropy of
the VMs (on the contrary!). The only way it can is if the text is
glossolalia in the first place, e.g. "Ave Maria Gratia Plena, 
Ave Maria Stella Maris" etc. -> "vmrgrpln vmrstllmrs". You will
still end with a lot of "vmr" which will help keep the entropy
down, not as low as the plaintext, but still low.

So, the Ukrainian hypothesis (or Levitov's Dutch-Catar hypothesis
for that matter) is only tenable if the VMs is gibberish. And,
when you read those decipherments, well... it is!

Let us, then, admit it is. In such a case, Levitov's decipherment
is just as valid as Stojko's and as other earlier ones, and the
many more to come. In such a case we have nothing to decide which
decipherment is wrong, which is right. Any could be right, all
could be wrong, you cannot tell which. Since there is a virtual infinity
of such decipherments, each is infinitesimally likely to be right.

I'd rather get my hands dirty adjusting the carburettor on my
car (that's when I had a Hillman Hunter--no hope with modern
cars) than adjusting the idle on a Lamborghini Countach which
I have an infinitesimal chance of ever owning--or coming across,
for that matter.



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