[Blog Post] Peter Bakker on the VMS

[Stephen Carlson]

Timm and Schinner's meaningless-text-algorithm seems to be the only solution to have gained some consensus among other researchers. On the other hand, Friedman came to the final hypothesis of an artificial language of the a priori type, suggesting that he believed that the creator(s) could understand the text. I doubt it will ever be possible to decide between meaningless and undecipherable.

Is there a test that can distinguish meaningless and undecipherable? And if there isn't, what does that mean for us?

For example, what do we do with a plaintext encoded by a one-time pad whose key is irrecoverably lost? I suppose it would be undecipherable, but not meaningless -- even though the meaning can never be recovered.

If we could distinguish whether it had once been meaningful even though we can never read it, what would that tell us? Would it affect how we think of the VM as an artifact (e.g., hoax vs. book of secret science)?