[Interview] An interview with Stephen Bax

[Torsten]

One has to study and discern the structure first, and then it might make sense to look for nouns/names or whatever might fit the circumstances. It does no good to look for nouns if the text is a self-replicating system or if it is a numerical system, or steganography, or any other of the dozen ways text might be represented other than in a natural-language substitution mode.

We've been doing that for a century, Jpk. Let's try a different angle and see what comes up. OK, so Stephen hasn't made any public headway on his angle of attack, but that's not to say we should stop.

Like many others Stephen is only trying to interpret something into the manuscript. This is not a new angle of attack.

It is not an easy task to analyze something without interpreting it. If you want to explain a complex system you need to find his most characteristic features. For doing so it is important to distinguish between observation, analysis and interpretation. It seems a good idea to explore the unknown by searching features known from somewhere else. But the danger is not to overlook something, the danger is that you will interpret something into the unknown system that isn't there. A better idea is therefore to describe the unknown system without any preconditions. If you do so it is possible to check if the features are known from somewhere else. Maybe they didn't match. But at least you would know what you are searching for.