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Re: VMs: Wikipedia & the vms



Hi Gabriel

Others with more detailed notes of their perusals of the Kelley materials may have more to say.

I looked at Kelley's material on Enochian in the British Library. It is not obvious to me he used a grill. He created enormous numbers of enormous (49x49) grids of letters (seemingly at random). He appeared to be using these to create texts.

It is interesting to speculate on Occam's Razor and human endeavours.

If one can achieve (laboriously) a given goal with a simple technique this may be preferred to a more complex technique - which is initially less attractive - even though the complexity comes with greater 'power' or 'generality' or whatever. In other words - the creator of an artefact may indeed persevere with a simple technique at the expense of saved-time/elegance which would come with something more complex.

On the other hand, we who try to recover the creative process are tempted to avoid Occam's injunction and leap to complex scenarios/solutions when they may not be relevant/appropriate.

Cheers

William



On 11 Oct 2004, at 12:34, Gabriel Landini wrote:

It says in the "Hoax" of the vms in the Wikipeda section that:
---
'' The latter device, known as a Cardan grille, was invented around 1550 as an
encryption tool, and was apparently used by Edward Kelley to fabricate his
Enochian "language". ''
---


How true is this "apparently"? I have not been able to find any source to
point where this speculation is coming from.


Cheers,

Gabriel
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Dr William Edmondson
School of Computer Science
University of Birmingham
Edgbaston B15 2TT
UK

Voice: +44-121-414-4763
email: w.h.edmondson@xxxxxxxxxx

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