TED-ED Video

[-JKP-]

It's also clear that Stephen was under certain constraints, he wasn't allowed to refer to specific research etc. On the other hand it's true that there seems to be some self-promotion involved, with the Tauron and such. But that's good for the general public.

The problem with the "natural language" question is that there are so many possibilities. Maybe we can statistically prove that it's not full sentences in any normal language. But could it be lists of nouns/names/adjectives? Directions, measurements, instructions...? In other words, might it be natural language in an unexpected text type?

There's another possibility that's been wandering through my mind lately, but it's hard to explain and it may be a dumb idea. I'll make a new thread 

I've spent many hours trying to reconcile the level of repetition and rigidity and I can't even get poetry, abbreviations, and lists to fit a format as unusual as the VMS, at least in its raw form. It would have to be lists of the same things and only of items with unusually similar names.

I think it's a big mistake to try to pull out words from labels or from individual parts of lines and trust the interpretation without broader corroboration, as these approaches have universally failed to generalize to the rest of the document. This manuscript has to be examined in toto on the basis of its internal patterns and the relationships of the tokens to each other. Anything else is guesswork for the simple reason that any sufficiently long collection of tokens will have a few that resolve into words and phrases in one language or another.





It's been my feeling for a very long time that if there is meaning in the text, it's a structured language, rather than a natural language, and the only reason I hold onto a shred of belief that it MIGHT be natural language is if the text is significantly manipulated (in terms of spaces and nulls, or a double conversion from a non-linguistic system that must then be further resolved into natural language).