Re: VMs: RE: GC's first reply

[Gordon Rugg <g.rugg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Okay, I'll bite....

GC wrote:

> (various good stuff deleted...)
>  You're eventually going to come down on one side of
> the fence or the other - either you're in the "language" camp or the
> "crypto-crackpot" camp, (a label I've come to wear as a badge of honor).
> Straddling the fence between the two sides is placing yourself directly in
> the line of fire, but this position too has a certain "courageousness"
> attached to it.  (The "hoax" theory is the easy way of drawing fire from
> either side, since few of us who have studied the nuances of this manuscript
> believe for a second that this manuscript was created for the purpose of
> perpetrating a hoax.)

Hmmm.....

The "hoax" theory is usually rejected on the grounds of what Dawkins calls
"argument from personal incredulity", i.e. "I find it impossible to believe X".
The problem with that is that expertise is brittle - the literature on expertise
consistently reports that when experts move off their home ground, their
performance drops rapidly to the level of lay people. An expert linguist may
know a lot more about linguistics than a lay person, but that doesn't mean they
are automatically an expert on hoaxing languages; likewise for codebreakers.

As far as I can tell, we simply don't have much solid reported data about how
easy or difficult it is to hoax any given feature of the VMS, so opinions about
this are currently at the level of speculation. Add to this the "VMS as
Rorschach" effect, and it's very easy to see all sorts of apparent complexities
in the manuscript. Stolfi's work on tables and Philip Neal's work on codes
provide some very useful starting points, but we really need more evidence about
hoaxing methods before we're in a position to make a solid statement about it.

So, returning to Glen's classification, we have:
The "unidentified language plaintext" argument, which has the problem that
Voynichese shows several properties very different from any known natural
language;
The "unidentified code" argument, which doesn't have major inherent flaws, but
which suggests that the VMS' unknown author produced something considerably more
sophisticated than the best known cryptographers of the period;
The "hoax" argument, which has the problem that we don't currently have enough
data to form a solid opinion either way about its plausibility.

That should keep us in business for a little while yet....

On a more  humorous note, there's always the possibility that someone will one
day post two lines of amusing-looking gibberish that they extracted from the VMS
using a method they've now forgotten, only to be told by a group member that the
"gibberish" is actually Burushaski for "Every even number is the sum of two
primes, and here is a truly marvelous proof of it." :-)

Best wishes,

Gordon

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