[Other] Course in Cologne focusing on VMS

[MarcoP]

Jürgen Hermes has posted a blog post about the course: "You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view."

A few passages from Hermes' post - Translated with You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

In spring Torsten added to the list and together with Andreas Schinner published his original theory with further evidence, based on statistical analyses, in Cryptologia. I had advised him to do this, because a Cryptologia article still counts more than an Open Access publication on ArXiv, even if the latter is much more accessible. But on Torsten's website you can find all his publications on this topic.
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I still cannot find any real arguments in the relevant forums to suggest that an alternative theory would be preferable to that of the autocopist. Perhaps the problem is that it threatens to lose much of the magic of VMS because it denies the manuscript a secret that might eventually be read. I think that's one of the reasons why many of the researchers are much more critical of Torsten's theory than it deserves. It is well elaborated, and Torsten has sincerely and scientifically honestly made every attempt to support his assumptions, both by tracing back virtually all of the strange properties of the VMS to conditions during its creation, and by proving that a complex yet clearly traceable algorithm can produce a text that comes closer than any other attempt to the properties of the VMS. He has even published it in a beautiful iOS app for self-testing. You can't do more than that.

On the one hand Torsten's theory is therefore unsatisfactory, on the other hand however (like - according to Popper - all scientific theories) also simply not verifiable, which is why one may doubt it of course. As I once explained myself, it is possible that the VMS contains a message, but the information has to be much shorter than in a natural language text of the same length. One possibility would be that the VMS contains a large number of zeros, i.e. fill characters without content. Only certain characters or words would then be relevant for the reconstruction of the encrypted information. As far as I can see, Torsten's approach cannot rule this out. But: Torsten's autocopist theory (without hidden message) is currently the one that most economically describes the possible emergence and the peculiarities of the VMS text shape. He therefore holds Ockham's razor firmly in his hand and whoever wants to get hold of it will have to deal with his approach.

While it may be true that Timm and Schinner's work has not been particularly well received, the fact that it has found the support of scholars like Hermes himself and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. seems quite significant to me. I intend to re-read their paper in the near future, and also see if I can understand something of their code.