Re: VMs: Faces at the roots

["JH" <haleyj@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Nick Pelling wrote on 29 April 2005 08:21

<< snip >>

>
> >On the downside it can never be a smooth solution in and of itself
> >and must be part of a multi table cipher.
>
> Well... I'd say that multiple tables are probably part of the remainder,
> but not all. Transposition ciphers (like Neal keys, line-initial
> characters, interleaved lines, etc) all seem to have their place as well.
>

The interleaved lines idea is not quite what it first appears to be. If we
take another look at the scan of that odd page f3r we see 4 distinct
paragraphs. Notice the initial words of each paragraph. The first words
of paragraphs one and two pair up as do those of paragraphs three and
four. The start gallows alternate and on the first word of each pair the ch
shows an indistinct plume as if the scribe was undecided as to whether
to add it or not. Maybe it is faint so as to be easily missed.

There are other peculiarities with this page which I won't go into now. To
me this seems to be a key page in the development of the method of the
VMS.

> >Why? Because as Jorge Stolfi
> >has shown VMS words have a hilly structure. The mid word peak seems
> >to suggest this quite strongly. If true then the words that break this
rule,
> >to my mind, show the scibe being particularly nasty in his choice of
> >substitutions.
>
> This "mid word peak" is where the information is apparently concentrated:
> but part of this could just as well be caused by an artificial method used
> for inserting spaces, or some kind of space transposition cipher, either
of
> which would be nasty in a completely different way.
>

Here I agree with some of Rene's findings and have no reason to believe
that the spaces are transposed. I also feel that the underlying plaintext,
if
any, is not rearranged in any way.

> >To get back to Wayne's point. I would be very interested in the results
of
> >work on the labels as these will be the most problemmatic to resolve. The
> >stickiest points are the appearance of (EVA) ot & ok at word starts.
>
> I have wondered many times what the difference between "t" and "ot" is...
I
> have a few ideas, but it's all a bit too vague at the moment. :-|
>

This is why the VMS author is so evil in his method. There is a clear
distinction between when he means a stand alone t gallows and one
that should be combined with other characters. This is one of the main
reasons that no amount of computer analysis will solve the VMS. It
suffers from too many human choices to allow this to happen.

> Cheers, .....Nick Pelling.....
>

Jeff


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