Re: Re: Re: VMs: Criteria for a successful solution

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

On Mon, 16 Aug 2004, Jan wrote:
> Well, it certainly cannot be "unconstructed" gibberish, the statistics
> shows it is not purely random, not even haphazard random.

Yes, so, since it seems to be constructed gibberish at a minimum, it seems
to me that the process of writing such material initially would have been
would have been more or less as laborious as writing most sorts of
encrypted text.

> >- The VMs is a clear copy, or a second copy, most likely by the original
> >author(s), since a latter day copiest would be less practiced (at first),
> >resulting in errors and awkwardly formed letters.
>
> Right, but I have the feeling that even when copying, it would be
> difficult to avoid few mistakes and subsequent erasures or deletions.
> But I might be wrong here.

I gather there actually are some erasures or scrapings, though I don't
remember who it was has referred to them recently.  Of course, I'm not
sure if anyone is in a position to claim identification of any unremoved
mistakes!  If this were a fair copy I would expect mistakes, too, but I
would expect that any that were noticed would be corrected cleanly, which
seems to be the case.  In other words, this isn't a draft.  It is either a
copy of a rough draft or finished copy or a very clean first copy.

Even if it is a copy, however, it appears that people studying the VMs
directly, rather than as EVA files, find that it doesn't seem to have any
elements of laboredness, such as might occur in copying material that had
been reduced to incomprehensibility, or simply encountered already in that
form.  To me this suggests the third possibility, which is that the
material being written was comprehensible as written.  It could still be
encrypted or obscured in several ways, apart from the script, but I would
guess that the author was able to produce the system as it was written.

k
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