RE: VMs: Link between Phaistos Disk & VMs...!?

["Marke Fincher" <MarkeFincher@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jeff says:
> It only goes to show, in my opinion anyway, that 
> there is meaningful content in the VMS.

I think it could certainly be considered evidence for
language-like levels of repetition and redundancy within
the content.  But I think the superblock property is 
probably a direct consequence of a vocabulary with a 
ZipF-like frequency distribution, because the superblock
is nothing more than an amalgam of the most frequent
words arranged so as to maximise the number of real
phrases represented within.

To my mind though it is also possible that non-meaningful 
construction methods could produce a vocab with the 
right frequencies, and as a consequence exhibit these 
properties,  although the possibility of someone 
achieving this hundreds of years ago stretches 
credibility a little.  But then we don't really know
for sure that it was written that long ago.

One nasty possibility that I'm sure none of us wants 
to think about is that the VMS was generated USING a 
plaintext as a source, but with a destructive or 
non-reversible method, solely with the intention of 
inheriting language-like properties and being
undecipherable!

But coming back to the cross-space connections, I
think there is definitely something important to 
learn there.  "dy.qo" is more frequent than the 
most frequent word!

Marke
      

    
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