Re: VMs: RE: question

[Gabriel Landini <G.Landini@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Friday 28 Feb 2003 1:35 am, GC wrote:
> If the VMS is not encoded, I don't see how entropy itself can
> offer an explanation for the oddities it contains.  

The characteristics gathered so far are there independently of what may think 
about how the vms was produced and any solution to the vms must explain why 
those statistical properties exist. That is, I think, a very important point.
There is no easy test to check whether the the document is a cipher or an 
abbreviated language or just a random sequence of characters.

> And when calculating entropy, what does one use as the recognized
> glyphset?  Is <sh> actually one glyph, or two?  Is <ccc> a single
> glyph, a combination of two, or three individual glyphs?  Surely
> one's interpretation of what constitutes a glyph would have a
> noticeable effect on the numbers generated by any program. 

That's why in the "counting commas" page (posted the link yesterday) the vms 
was translated into most (all?) the available V-alphabets. If one can think 
of another alphabet, then the easiest thing to do is to create a bitrans 
table and run the same programme again. If it is not possible to do a bitrans 
translation, then another transcription is necessary.

> After establishing in ones mind what constitutes a glyph, conduct
> a survey of the use of each glyph, noting variants from the norm.

This is much easier said than done.
Is  VV=W? or \/\/?
Is A=/-\? or /\ and -, or even /- and \?
Is LL a letter or 2 letters? (it may be 2 in English, but it is 1 in Spanish, 
and same with CH).
Solfi's JSA does something like that. One could try to agglomerate strokes 
into likely sets, but so far I am not sure how one can go about it. Any ideas 
are welcome.

Cheers,
Gabriel



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