Re: VMs: split words

[Koontz John E <John.Koontz@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 3 Sep 2004, Marke Fincher wrote:
> I've done a little experiment around the idea of split-words,
> or that some of the spaces in the VMs are misdirectional.
>
> For each unique five letter string that occurs within words
> (there are 8400), I've looked to see if that same sequence
> appears elsewhere but with a space inserted.  It turns out
> that in 3000 (36%) a split-sequence does occur.  In many
> cases the same 5 char sequence is split in 3 or even 4
> different ways (a few examples are shown at the end).
>
> This is interesting, and I feel gives more weight to the
> hoax argument than to the natural language argument.

It does seem unnatural, but I'm not clear on why it supports the hoax
theory over an enncrypted or misleadingly presented natural language,
which last seems to be what you were initially considering.

In the case of all but the simplest patterns of encryption, one wouldn't
expect a five letter sequence to represent consistently the same
underlying five letter sequence, right?  I don't really have any idea to
what extent a more elaborately encrypted text would exhibit the
statistical behavior you observe.
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