Re: VMs: Addendum to the addendum

[Gordon Rugg <g.rugg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Jeff,

You have my sympathies about workload....

I've used something vaguely similar to this to produce VMS-style labels (again,
I'll publish the details as soon as I can). The vaguely similar method (a catchy
name, if ever there was one!) was good for producing unique "words", and for
handling VMS-style features such as different character frequencies in labels
from different sections of the manuscript (for instance, my "stars" section
contains quite a few labels which have prefixes reminiscent of Arabic "al"). I
produced the labels sequentially, ignoring a high proportion of possible
combinations so that it wouldn't be immediately obvious that the labels were
being generated mechanically. I then assigned each label to a different
non-sequential page, to further disrupt any appearance of systematic trends in
the labels.

This was fast - it would be possible to generate unique labels for a 250 page
document in a morning - and produced something which looked plausible and fairly
complex. My quire plans contained notes such as "include a couple of labels from
X and Y on this page to make it look like cross-referencing", which would
further add to the apparent complexity and realism.

The main problem was that this method didn't handle the prohibited combinations
of Voynichese (Stolfi's "cannot/mannot" effect); it probably wouldn't produce
Voynichese-style entropy values or letter serial correlation values either.

I should perhaps emphasise that this doesn't constitute a claim that the VMS is
a hoax - this was part of some work to find out which features of the VMS are
explicable as part of a hoax, and which aren't. My current opinion is that
neither the uniqueness of labels, nor apparent cross-referencing between VMS
pages, are strong arguments against a hoax, since both of these features turn
out to be very easy to hoax. There are other features of the VMS, however, which
are more consistent with a code than with a hoax - I'm working on those as time
permits.

Best wishes,

Gordon


Jeff wrote:

> Does anyone feel up to making the wheel device or is that my sad task? After
> all I am new to all this and if it happens to pan out I don't think I should
> get any credit. It would be interesting in and of itself to see if a text
> encrypted in this manner showed the same tendencies as the VMS. If no one
> wants to take up the challenge I will try it myself. The only problem I have
> is limited time. I'M TOO DAMN BUSY! :-)
>
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