Re: VMs: RE: The key

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Jeff,

At 15:50 14/02/2004 +0000, Jeff wrote:
> I cannot post anything conclusive without the express permission of others
> involved. That is the reason I am holding back. The evidence isn't totally
> conclusive yet. One thing I will say is that soon I will have either
> vindicated Strong or blown him completely out of the picture. That should
> take about a week or two.  I believe I will show him wrong, but he had the
> right initial idea.

As you should know by know, my own attempts to understand his work tell me 
that Strong Was Wrong.

My opinions are (a) that he got the basic cipher alphabet wrong [any 
attempt to understand "qo", "dy", "or" or "ol" as anything but 
intrinsically composite pairs of letters will fail], (b) that his basic 
identification of the cipher as a kind of cyclic polyalphabetic 
substitution cipher was wrong [it's far too structured for that, and fails 
to explain many curious features we see], (c) that his tables are too 
localised and don't really make sense [you try using them & see how far you 
get], (d) that his proposed placing/dating seems inconsistent with many 
features of the drawings [which generally point to middle/southern Europe, 
circa 1450], and (e) that his decryption method ultimately relied on 
selecting the best-looking one from a set of permutations, which leaves it 
wide open to the charge of over-interpretationism [ie, seeing what you want 
to see].

GC invested a lot of time and effort in trying to support Strong's ideas 
against assaults on each of these weaknesses - it is a great credit to his 
ingenuity and persistence that GC was able to argue Strong's case so 
effectively, and I sincerely miss his presence in the group. However, I 
think that in the end Strong simply saw what he wanted to see (an English 
Renaissance gynaecological herbal, written in a polyalphabetic cipher), and 
that GC perhaps got swept up in Rayman Maleki's enthusiasm for it.

Of course, not everyone here believes (a)-(e) with the same conviction as 
me (especially (a)) - no matter, you'll all catch up in time. :-)

> Everything I have posted here has been a progression. No matter how silly or
> mad it seemed to everyone. I am determining the underlying structure in ways
> that I believe no one else has. I may be totally wrong on this point, who
> knows. Only time will tell.

Jeff, here's the deal. It's like they used to say at MIT - "prototype or 
die". Either post stuff up (and we'll help you move your ideas forward) or 
don't (and exist in a vacuum). As I mentioned before, the chances of any 
single idea being sufficient to "break" the VMs seems dwindlingly small - 
our only salvation is likely to lie in *collaboration*.

I think it's fairly true to say that just about everyone (when trying to 
grasp the VMs) goes through a period when it seems they can see something 
that nobody else can. However, this is merely a temporary hallucination - 
the VMs' structures and subtleties have defeated all theories to date and 
will (without any real doubt, especially if you're starting from EVA) 
defeat yours too.

That's not to suggest that you give up without a fight - but rather, join 
us to fight as a group.

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


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