Re: VMs: Three frequency tables

[steve ekwall <ekwall2@xxxxxxxx>]

hi all :-))

*yes*, *yes*, *yes*, Nick :-)

The "gallows" are KEY!, THE "GALLOWS" can be BOTH, starters (as in 
where 
to start on the master key page), as well as Pointers (as in their 
positioning on the key/page your presently in/on).

TouchE~ Sir, you are truly "2 of 12", now we just need 10 more!!

:-o

best to you & yours
-=se=-
steve (not "fragile", but infinitly ~weird~) ekwall :-))

p.s. while the gallows (& all the vms charachters) are static 
they are _not_ "proxies", but forfill the role of PRIMARY POINTERS and 
"Hick/SHIFTERS" ( that is to Flip your masterkey page etc..)

ref:

 Date: Sat, 20 Dec 2003 11:53:31 +0000
 From: Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
 Reply-To: vms-list@xxxxxxxxxxx
 To: vms-list@xxxxxxxxxxx
 Subject: Re: VMs: Three frequency tables
 
 Hi Dennis,
 
 At 22:39 19/12/2003 -0600, Dennis wrote:
 >         But what else are you thinking of?  Do you mean that
 >you don't think the gallows are just markers for cipher
 >change?  (I've never liked that either, but that
 >because it doesn't look like a polyalphabetic cipher to
 >me.)
 
 Perhaps we might usefully describe ciphers which change state only on 
 certain characters as being "multi-cipher" (rather than "polyalphabetic", 
 which we might instead use to denote those which continuously cycle / 
 change on every character).
 
 While it's entirely possible that (as Steve Ekwall suggests) the VMs is 
 multi-cipher and changes cipher table on gallows (rather: that it folds on 
 gallows, flips on <ch>, and rotates on <ee>), note that that doesn't 
 necessarily imply that gallows could only act as "markers" (ie as 
 state-change tokens with no semantic content).
 
 For example, each gallows state could have a separate (cipher-specific) 
 replacement value for each gallows character that appears after it. This is 
 quite possible - but I don't feel 100% comfortable with it, as it feels too 
 "fragile" for a Quattrocento cipher system. FWIW, there's a kind of mental 
 step cryptography took (circa 1500) with the move to polyalphabeticity, 
 whereby *robustness* was seen to be tradable for *security* - but I don't 
 think this is the case with the VMs.
 
 If instead the gallows (as per the GMT) act as proxies for letters in some 
 kind of local key (whether horizontal, vertical, line-initial, line-final, 
 or whatever), then they could function *both* as local replacement 
 characters *and* as global state-change tokens. This would be an extremely 
 interesting way of combining two simpler cipher systems into a more complex 
 system - and is what I suspect is probably going on under the VMs' hood. :-)
 
 Cheers, .....Nick Pelling..... 
 
 
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