[Blog Post] The Pattern of the Wheel on 57v

[Jorge_Stolfi]

I assume the paper is this one: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
[...] First of all, the number of authors is not known for 59% of the sample set, so even as an extrapolation the argument is not very good.

Actually it would be a good argument, IF the VMS has been chosen at random among the category of "encrypted books".  

Say there is a box with 118 tokens, some marked "M" (multiple authors) and some marked "S" (single author).  You pick one token at random from the box, but it drops into a hole before you can read it.  You must guess whether it was an "M" or an "S". So you spill the contents of the box on the floor, and count what you see among the remaining 117 tokens.  73 of the tokens fall face down; 44 fall face up, and they are all "S".  That is very strong statistical evidence that the one you picked was an "S" too.

BUT this does not apply here, because the VMS is not a randomly chosen encrypted book...

About that paper, the authors themselves note that the VMS clearly does not fit into several of their sub-categories, so it is wrong to include them in the statistics. It either belongs to the "knowledge", "hoax", or "unknown" classes.  

And some of those which they count as "hoaxes" I would count as "puzzles" or "weird 'knowledge' by a crank author".  I would think that the Steganographia, in particular, was meant as a puzzle, but with the intent "lI am an expert cryptographer, and the proof is this encrypted book, I bet you can't decipher it".  (Didn't Rafael Mnishovsky write such a book too?) So the claim that "puzzle" books are all modern seems to be incorrect.

And the Tables of Soyga too I would classify as "knowledge" book.  By someone who believed (or enjoyed) kabala stuff, and found a method that would turn a single six-letter word into a page full of strange letter patterns which "surely" must have had some deep cosmic significance...

All the best, --jorge