Re: Re: VMs: Re: VMs, RuggWatch

["Jan" <hurychj@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello Nick,  
 
======= At 2004-07-22, 15:16:00 you wrote: =======

>I like the WordNet definition of 'hoax' as "deliberate trickery intended to 
>gain an advantage" - note that this is neutral on whether the means 
>employed to execute the hoax should appear meaningful or not. For VMs hoax 
>theory proponents, the VMs is therefore not a hoax - it is the residue of a 
>hoax (ie, of an act of hoaxing).

Right you are. And it neither needed to encode  the gibberish to be a hoax.What were the reasons for encoding some gibberish anyway?  According to Gordon, it was to save time. O.K., if we take for instance Kelley, we can imagine WHY he would  fabricate a hoax, but HOW he would go about it?      

 First, he would have to get some old vellum, reasonably old-looking ink and  he could  just 
 started  to write, right?  Wrong! He  started to fill vellum with many pictures and spent 
 enormous number of hours just making them. Why would he waste so much time on 
 that? Just to add to the mystery? Sure, but so MANY pictures? It certainly beats 
 Gordon's reasoning that the author just wanted to save time. 

Now for the text: wouldn't it be more reasonable for author to write some text of his 
own and pretend it is something older?   Kelley actually did write some works so why 
settle here just for gibberish?   And another thing: if the author used Cardan grille,  why he had 
to choose gibberish at all? The encoding would not go any faster than with "normal" 
text! Besides, the VM has certain rules, that's why is now Gordon trying to figure out 
how to simulate the VM structure. If those rules had to be implemented by author 
manually, there was another substantial loss of time.  And the result would be only the  more sofisticated gibberish :-).

I think that's where Gordon  drifted in the land of dreams - as a mathematician, he is 
more interested in encrypting and automation of the process than in the psychology of a 
hoaxer.   All in all, Gordon knows that even if the encoding  was done by Cardan grille, 
he himself would not be able to solve it  - there is still that strange script and dubious language - 
so he could not provide the original text . By claiming  the source was "gibberish", he bypassed all that  - or he thinks so :-). All he has to do now is to provide another VM 
look-alike gibberish, right? Not  in my book. Another irony is he does not  need Cardan 
grille to do that, he can surely use some other encoding system. 

The  exotic cocktail  of otherwise unconnected points - the Cardan  grille, Kelley, 
gibberish and hoax - may  provide for good sci-fi, but is otherwise quite superficial 
mixture, made by piling one assumption on another. That does not mean Gordon's efforts are without bonus - he might discover other hidden rules in the VM, but  to  our (and probably even his) sorrow it will never lead to the original text (or gibberish, for that matter :-).

Jan



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