Re: VMs: VMS: the "Mario cipher" again. Last of it I hope.

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Jacques,

At 13:02 23/12/2003 +1000, Jacques Guy wrote:
> So, we have here a cipher which reduces the
> entropy of the plaintext and exhibits the
> same "shape harmony" as the VMS.

Verbose ciphers are interesting, aren't they? :-)

Don't forget that you can also move the statistics in the opposite 
direction (by replacing verbose pairs in the VMs with single tokens) to try 
to find some kind of middle ground. I should have done this more actively 
before now... it's on my list, honest... :-o

BTW, one curious thing about <or> in particular is that despite the fact 
that it appears so very many times in the VMs (and so I believe is 
extremely likely to be a verbose cipher pair), on a good number of 
occasions the scribe has inserted a space between the two letters. One 
example I mentioned before (last March) is f15v line 2: this contains <or 
oro raiin>, which would seem to be a deliberately misleading rendering of 
<or or or aiin> (but I suspect the repetition would have made it look too 
obviously like a verbose cipher).

FWIW, it's these kinds of things which make me think it's a cipher rather 
than a language. :-)

Cheers, ....Nick Pelling.... 


______________________________________________________________________
To unsubscribe, send mail to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxx with a body saying:
unsubscribe vms-list