Re: VMs: Possible optical device

[Dennis <tsalagi@xxxxxxxx>]

> "Anders, Claus" wrote:
> 
> Each gallow
> will tell the reader, which side of the device is to
> used.

	I think we've heard this idea, although not such 
a device.  This idea is that the VMs cipher is  
polyalphabetic substitution, and the gallows letters 
indicate where to change ciphers.  

	Strong, I think, proposed this idea in the
1940's but his solution was pretty clearly wrong, since
it
contained linguistic anachronisms.  

	In general, modern polyalphabetic substitution 
ciphers wouldn't produce the character entropy profile 
we see in the VMs, but they change 
the cipher at each letter.  If you only changed the
cipher 
at each gallow and only had a few different ciphers
for the whole VMs, I'm not sure.  I think the entropies
would 
look more like a simple substitution cipher and closer
to 
natural language, but that again is not like the VMs. 
Of course,
that's assuming that the underlying natural language is
a 
typical Western Indo-European one!

Dennis
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