Re: VMs: Re: NSU review of Rugg (2003)...

[Gordon Rugg <g.rugg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Gabriel,

I think we might be talking about different things. One of them is how the VMS
_could_  have been produced. The other is how the VMS _was_  produced. There's
also the related issue of what the VMS contains (meaningful text, gibberish, etc).

I think that the table and grille method _could have_  been used to produce the
VMS, on the basis of the evidence we have so far. It's conceivable that other
methods could have been used, but as far as I know, nobody's described any other
feasible methods yet. If anyone does, then we can look for ways of choosing
between the various candidates. I'm looking into things like LSC to see whether
these can be accounted for by tables and grilles, or whether they exclude this
possibility.

As for whether the VMS _was_ created using this method, I'm looking for testable
hypotheses which will either refute this possibility, or which allow us to exclude
other options. As my previous posts indicate, finding testable hypotheses is not
easy, but it should be possible - I posted a couple earlier today.

As for what the VMS contains, I've used a broad definition of "meaningful text" to
include things like artificial languages, etc, even if we can't recover their
meaning - the key feature of this definition is that the VMS would be derived from
a plaintext which was once meaningful to someone.

Best wishes,

Gordon



Gabriel Landini wrote:

> On Friday 19 December 2003 08:52, Gordon Rugg wrote:
> > Possibility 1: meaningless gibberish only
> > Possibility 2: some meaningless gibberish and some meaningful text
> > Possibility 3: meaningful text only
> >
> > I'm saying that _if_ all the features of the VMS can be accounted for by
> > possibility 1 above, then that's the most economical explanation.
>
> I am still not to convinced with this. I think option 1 is undecidable because
> one cannot cover a truly meaningful text in:
>
> any *possible* language (known & lost, including artificial ones)
> any *possible* encoding of those (good and bad [lossy] methods).
>
> Cheers,
>
> Gabriel
>
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