Re: VMs: Astronomical Cipher

["Lukas Palatinus" <palat@xxxxxx>]

Hi Larry,

> Regarding Saturn's Rings:
> 
> "The true nature of the rings was dicovered by Huygens in 1655, who
> announced it in this curious form:-
> 
>   aaaaaaa ccccc d eeeee g h iiiiiii llll mm nnnnnnnnn oooo pp q rr 
s
>   ttttt uuuuu

Well, this "cipher", known as anagram, was used quite often in past. 
The property of (longer) anagrams is that you can easily create them, 
but it is (almost) impossible to decipher them - there are simply too 
many possibilities to order the letters. Moreover, it is almost 
impossible to construct two distinct sentences with identical 
anagrams.

Anagrams were used to prove some discovery has been made by the 
author, but - at the same time - to keep the discovery secret. They 
were not intended to be deciphered by anybody else, no "key" exists 
for them apart from the full plain text. The author, who published 
the anagram, could say later: "Look, I have know this already, 
otherwise I could not have constructed this anagram". (Eh, this 
sentence is almost certainly grammatically incorrect... :-)

If VMs were this kind of cipher, all our effort would be useless, 
because it could not be unambiguously deciphered. However, this does 
not exclude the possibility VMs IS a sort of anagram, of course. 

Btw., anagrams were part of the proposed Newbold's solution.

Greetings

Lukas

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