Hi Marke,
I'm not sure, but couldn't this kind of effect result from text generated by some kind of Markov process? Where after writing each character (or character pair, or whatever) you then have a limited choice of permitted following characters. I suspect that this kind of method could produce something like the VMS internal word structure as well as the kind of chains that you are discovering.
FWIW the decision as to the choice of following character could be random, in which case the VMS couold be considered a 'hoax' - but the choice could be based on the character in a plaintext, in which case it would be a genuine encrypted document.
Just a thought...
Jon.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Marke Fincher [mailto:markefincher@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
> Sent: 09 September 2004 09:05
> To: vms-list@xxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: RE: VMs: truncated repeating sequences
>
>
>
> > I have an idea now that I know what's causing it but would need
> > more detailed information.
>
> Unfortunately I feel there is one fairly obvious explanation for
> these repeated subsequences, although people wont like it!
> They might all originate from the same underlying piece of text.
>
> Say the author creates a block of text by writing out a number
> of short phrases such as "aiin.shedy.qokeedy.qotedy.qo", one
> per line. Then he moves a rectangular window (about 10 chars
> wide) randomly over the block and writes the text within the
> window to the manuscript. This would naturally produce all
> the variations that you see below:
>
> seq0 07466:a
> seq0 02408:ai
> seq0 00333:aii
> seq0 00030:aiin
> seq0 03220:aiin.
> seq0 00082:aiin.s
> seq0 00184:aiin.sh
> seq0 00165:aiin.she
> seq0 00009:aiin.shed
> seq0 00024:aiin.shedy.
> seq0 00006:aiin.shedy.qo
> seq0 00002:aiin.shedy.qok
> seq0 00005:aiin.shedy.qoke
> seq0 00001:aiin.shedy.qokeedy.
> seq0 00002:aiin.shedy.qokeedy.qo
> seq0 00001:aiin.shedy.qokeedy.qote
> seq0 00001: hedy.qokeedy.qotedy.qo
> seq0 00001: keedy.qotedy.qo
> seq0 00011: edy.qotedy.qo
> seq0 00003: dy.qotedy.qo
> seq0 00008: y.qotedy.qo
> seq0 00005: .qotedy.qo
> seq0 00043: otedy.qo
> seq0 00011: tedy.qo
> seq0 01388: edy.qo
> seq0 00516: dy.qo
> seq0 01589: y.qo
> seq0 01613: .qo
> seq0 00035: qo
> seq0 19453: o
>
> I have so far found 6 "master" sequences, but that was by manually
> examining one of my output files. There may be quite a few more and
> it may be possible to actually recreate the block of text that (maybe)
> was used in this fashion. Quite a few maybe's there!
>
> The essential difference in this (hypothesized) method from Rugg's is
> that (a) the block of text is actually a bunch of psuedo-phrases each
> one of which is created by the author to look meaningful, and
> (b) the selection process extracts "chunks" and not individual chars.
>
> Marke
>
>
>
>
>
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