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Re: VMs: Plants in the VM
Hello
Here are as aked for Gordon Rugg s whereabouts as indicated in Cryptologia issue xxviii, 1:
Department of Computer Science
Keele University
Keele Staffordshire
ST5 5BG
UK
This is the easy one. Now why not totally convincing? Well yes it is certainly a serious attack at the hoax hypothesis, since it was published in this distinguished Quarterly. Is it the best one? I would say possibly at the moment; the best one will be perhaps the successful achievement of the demonstration of the hoax? Do you know other serious attacks of this kind so that we can establish a comparison?
I had an access to the article and although I am not an expert I have got the personal impression that it is serious and impressive but not totally convincing; here is the title: "An elegant hoax"? This is a question; and now the title's answer: "A possible solution to the Voynich manuscript".
Of course the hoax is possible. And so what? Let s have a look at the abstract. The very interesting part of G.R.s article is that "this article describes how sixteenth century cryptographic techniques can be adapted to generate text similar to that in the Voynich ms". Here is almost certainly an achievement but e.g. why 16th century?
Now "this method can be used either to generate gibberish for a hoax or to encode plaintext in a decodable cipher". This is nice, did G.R. try to demonstrate also the second hypothesis?
An other very interesting achievement is that the author states that "premiliminary results suggest that a document of the size of the V. ms could be produced by a single hoaxer in two or three months". Perhaps a definitive study could eliminate the three or four months option.
And finally the conclusion: "It is concluded that the hoax hypothesis is now a plausible explanation for the V. ms". The now is brillant.
I am very much open-minded on the above discussion. Perhaps you could try and read the article before or after contacting this gentleman?
Best regards,
Jean Artero
PK#01 <pklist01@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I just read Cryptologia 's issue of January 2004. Besides the very
> interesting if not totally convincing article on VM by Gordon Rugg,
Is there an e-mail address somewhere? I would like to check with Gordon Rugg
whether he has noticed the same autocorrelations as we have. I'm sure he did
some heavy statistical analysis on the VMS.
And why "not totally convincing"? I have no access to the magazine, but from
this list I got the impression that this was the best attack yet at the hoax
hypothesis.
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