Re: VMs: Blanks

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Maurizio,

At 19:01 02/03/2004 +0100, Maurizio Gavioli wrote:
> Does anyone with a greater familiarity with late medieval / early modern 
> cyphers can summarize the status of the blank in them?

AFAIK, usually removed - they make it too easy to guess words. :-)

My guess is that some magical ciphers may rely on the shapes of their 
letters for their power (rather than their unreadability), so there might 
be examples of ciphers where spaces were retained.

I also don't know if there is a date before which people didn't think to 
remove spaces at all.

> I mean: there are occurrences of cyphers ignoring the blanks altogether? 
> And of cyphers *restoring* 'faked' blanks (randomly?) in the cripted text?

I don't recall any of the sources I've read on early cryptography 
specifically mentioning the reversible coding of blanks in ciphertext, but 
it's certainly possible. For example, in the past I've suggested a "space 
transposition cipher": this would work by removing real spaces and 
inserting fake spaces at plausible-looking syllable ends (say).

ie: fo rex amp leint hepas ti vesug ge ste dasp acet ran spo siti oncip 
her. :-)

This is, however, purely conjecture on my part (and is only "mostly 
reversible"). :-o

> Or, at the other end, of cyphers considering the blank a character in 
> itself, taking part to the cripting algorithm?

Again, it's certainly possible, but I don't know of any recorded examples 
in early cryptography. My instinct would be that this would have been 
conceptually unlikely in Europe before the advent of printing (because it 
requires seeing space as a serialised printed character), and only vaguely 
plausible after that (because thinking in ASCII is a modern peculiarity). :-o

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


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