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Re: VMs: Astronomical Cipher
Thanks, Lukas! I guess I always think of anagrams as a re-ordering of letters in a word, or series of words, such that they form another word (or sentence). But of course, nothing predicates that this be so.
Pretty crafty!
ps: I don't think that the VMS was done as such, I just found it interesting. Apparently is was not without historical precident.
******************************
Larry Roux
Syracuse University
lroux@xxxxxxx
*******************************
>>> palat@xxxxxx 05/26/04 02:16 AM >>>
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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