Re: VMs: repetitions repetitions

[elvogt@xxxxxxxxxxx]

Zitat von Marke Fincher <markefincher@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:

> 
> ...
> 
> Marke
> 
> [sits back and awaits flamage... :-]
> 

As far as I'm concered, you'll have to wait a little longer. Actually, 
the "codebook" idea (-> every VM word is a pointer to a table with plaintext 
words, or in your case a "bible" word) is the one which struck me as the most 
plausible.

Word length distributions could be explained if the VM script is actually a 
Roman numbering system in disguise. (I think somebody already pointed out that 
VM word length matches the length of evenly distributed Roman numbers quite 
well -- is that correct?)

So you could have something like

IX.VII.IV.III

to indicate "book 9, chapter 7, verse 4, word 3".

Indeed, if this is the method used, it's going to be next to impossible to 
decipher.

Of course, there are a few problems with the idea:

*) When encoding, it's going to take an awfully long time to find bible 
passages containing the particular word you need for each and every sentence. 
(This could be mended by my earlier idea that no book is used, but an impromptu 
table is set up, into which you just enter new words whenever you need them, 
and assign sequentially growing numbers to them. That'd also explain similar 
words next to each other [with a new topic/idea, you're likely to need a bunch 
of new words which would be assigned neighboring numbers], though not identical 
words following each other. If you kept a set of filecards with the plaintext 
words in alphabetical order, you'd also be able to speed up encoding 
considerably.)

*) When using Roman numbers, you'd also need a separator of some kind -- if the 
above example IX.VII.IV.III would be reduced to IXVIIIVIII, you'd introduce a 
lot of ambiguity. Besides, Roman numbering uses only 7 letters (I, V, X, L, C, 
D, M), while the VM seems to be using a considerably larger character set.

*) The particular role of the gallows isn't explained.

This all is not to say that you're necessarily wrong. You could explain it, but 
IMHO (not censoring anyone, mind you ;-) it just appears an awfully complicated 
and cumbersome system, heaping layer of layer of encryption on top of each 
other.

(I'm still convinced the VM scheme is actually trivially simple, and we're all 
thinking way too complicated.)

One method to test it, though, might be paragraph initial and terminal words. 
Perhaps the frequencies of these words in the VM can be shown to coincide with 
similar words in real life plaintext sentences.

Cheers, and thanks for sharing your ideas! Perhaps we can get a fruitful 
discussion going again... for a change.

   Elmar



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