20-02-2016, 06:07 PM
One of the most important facts about the text is that the words are "pronounceable", in that there's a mapping of the individual glyphs onto the Roman alphabet that makes the words basically pronounceable in English. Obviously this fact is not true for many/most types of ciphertexts. The fact that this mapping preserves letters esssentially identical to "a", "e", and "o" as vowels shows that this is not coincidental. We could also probably make the words even more pronounceable if we allowed the use of a phoneme inventory of a language other than that of English. It seems impossible that this could be completely accidental. So already we have moved from "language, cipher, or gibberish" to "language, ciphertext that resembles unencrypted text, or gibberish that resembles unencrypted text".
Next we have the low entropy of the text. This is perfectly consistent with unencrypted natural language text in an alphabetic script, as shown by the fact that Japanese and Hawaiian (and probably countless other languages that haven't been checked) have a lower entropy than the VMS text, whereas the only type of cipher that produces such low entropy text is verbose cipher, and verbose cipher can be ruled about because the words are simply not long enough, and there aren't enough common two-word sequences to assume that the words have been broken up into multiple smaller words.
So, already we're looking at language-like text that cannot have been produced by any known cipher mechanism. As of 2016, nobody has ever developed a cipher capable of replicating even a fraction of the VMS text's properties, despite the enormous advances in cryptography that have been made since the VMS was produced, and the fact that some of the best cryptographers in the world have worked specifically on the VMS.
Other issues:
The <p> and <f> gallows in initial lines of paragraphs are often cited as something non-linguistic, but actually many old Latin manuscripts have these kinds of embellishments. Do they ever show up in ciphertexts? If not, then I'd count them as another point in favor of unencrypted natural language text.
The fact that the alphabet is "invented" is cited as evidence favoring cipher, but adapting existing scripts to write new languages is how most scripts in use in the world came about, and I'd argue that the VMS script is no different.
One of the most remarkable aspects of the VMS script is that it is designed to highlight and emphasize the structure of the text. This is completely contrary to the purpose of cryptography, which is to conceal any structure in the ciphertext in order to make it more difficult to crack. However, creating such a script is perfectly logical to do if you are designing one for a natural language.
Structural properties of the text aside, it's hard to see how a ciphertext resembling the VMS would ever be put to use. How would someone read it?
For instance, could someone who understands the "system" involved here read the VMS "as is", or would he need to work out the plaintext on scratch paper (errr.... guess that would be "scratch parchment")? It seems that only simple types of ciphers (substitution etc.) would be readable without writing out the plaintext, and these can all basically be ruled out in the case of the VMS. So we have our potential reader of the VMS copying out the plaintext by hand.
But what about the illustrations and circular diagrams? Does he copy these out as well? Some of them would seem hard to use without the associated text being deciphered too. What would he do with all the labels? Would he write the unenciphered text directly on the VMS? Or maybe "tape" the deciphered text on in some way (did they have anything like tape back then?). It seems hard to see how he would do it without copying all the illustrations. And then does he add all the colors as well? This is really sounding like quite a lot of work to use this thing. Is there any precedent for this?
And now that our VMS reader has gone through all the trouble to decipher the manuscript, and has the unencrypted plaintext sitting in front of him, we have to ask: what was the point of encrypting it in the first place? To protect its secrets while it was in transit? Isn't this a lot of trouble to go through to protect it while it was in transit? And what about the VMS is even worth keeping secret? A bunch of information about herbs? A zodiac? Does that make any sense? Is there a known example of an encrypted herbal or an encrypted zodiac?
Some people say it was encrypted to protect its creator from the church. Apparently this is the church that hates information about herbs, but has no problem with naked women swimming in pools of green fluid.
It's hard to see a sensible motive here. I guess you could argue that there doesn't necessarily have to be one, and that the creator of the VMS could have been foolish or insane (despite having apparently been one of the greatest cryptographers of all time). But when you combine the fact that the properties of the text itself are incompatible with any known type of cipher with the fact that many other subtle aspects of the VMS seem incompatible with a cryptological intention, it seems more reasonable to conclude that we're not looking at a ciphertext here. Especially since I don't see any convincing positive evidence for a ciphertext being presented.
Next we have the low entropy of the text. This is perfectly consistent with unencrypted natural language text in an alphabetic script, as shown by the fact that Japanese and Hawaiian (and probably countless other languages that haven't been checked) have a lower entropy than the VMS text, whereas the only type of cipher that produces such low entropy text is verbose cipher, and verbose cipher can be ruled about because the words are simply not long enough, and there aren't enough common two-word sequences to assume that the words have been broken up into multiple smaller words.
So, already we're looking at language-like text that cannot have been produced by any known cipher mechanism. As of 2016, nobody has ever developed a cipher capable of replicating even a fraction of the VMS text's properties, despite the enormous advances in cryptography that have been made since the VMS was produced, and the fact that some of the best cryptographers in the world have worked specifically on the VMS.
Other issues:
The <p> and <f> gallows in initial lines of paragraphs are often cited as something non-linguistic, but actually many old Latin manuscripts have these kinds of embellishments. Do they ever show up in ciphertexts? If not, then I'd count them as another point in favor of unencrypted natural language text.
The fact that the alphabet is "invented" is cited as evidence favoring cipher, but adapting existing scripts to write new languages is how most scripts in use in the world came about, and I'd argue that the VMS script is no different.
One of the most remarkable aspects of the VMS script is that it is designed to highlight and emphasize the structure of the text. This is completely contrary to the purpose of cryptography, which is to conceal any structure in the ciphertext in order to make it more difficult to crack. However, creating such a script is perfectly logical to do if you are designing one for a natural language.
Structural properties of the text aside, it's hard to see how a ciphertext resembling the VMS would ever be put to use. How would someone read it?
For instance, could someone who understands the "system" involved here read the VMS "as is", or would he need to work out the plaintext on scratch paper (errr.... guess that would be "scratch parchment")? It seems that only simple types of ciphers (substitution etc.) would be readable without writing out the plaintext, and these can all basically be ruled out in the case of the VMS. So we have our potential reader of the VMS copying out the plaintext by hand.
But what about the illustrations and circular diagrams? Does he copy these out as well? Some of them would seem hard to use without the associated text being deciphered too. What would he do with all the labels? Would he write the unenciphered text directly on the VMS? Or maybe "tape" the deciphered text on in some way (did they have anything like tape back then?). It seems hard to see how he would do it without copying all the illustrations. And then does he add all the colors as well? This is really sounding like quite a lot of work to use this thing. Is there any precedent for this?
And now that our VMS reader has gone through all the trouble to decipher the manuscript, and has the unencrypted plaintext sitting in front of him, we have to ask: what was the point of encrypting it in the first place? To protect its secrets while it was in transit? Isn't this a lot of trouble to go through to protect it while it was in transit? And what about the VMS is even worth keeping secret? A bunch of information about herbs? A zodiac? Does that make any sense? Is there a known example of an encrypted herbal or an encrypted zodiac?
Some people say it was encrypted to protect its creator from the church. Apparently this is the church that hates information about herbs, but has no problem with naked women swimming in pools of green fluid.
It's hard to see a sensible motive here. I guess you could argue that there doesn't necessarily have to be one, and that the creator of the VMS could have been foolish or insane (despite having apparently been one of the greatest cryptographers of all time). But when you combine the fact that the properties of the text itself are incompatible with any known type of cipher with the fact that many other subtle aspects of the VMS seem incompatible with a cryptological intention, it seems more reasonable to conclude that we're not looking at a ciphertext here. Especially since I don't see any convincing positive evidence for a ciphertext being presented.