[Article] Naibbe cipher paper

[magnesium]

The clear next step, as I see it, is to learn from the current version of the Naibbe cipher and attempt to develop methods that address what it cannot currently replicate, with an initial focus on long-range correlations. I have said from the very beginning that the Naibbe cipher is a place to start. More generally, it seems useful to have a VMS benchmark that preserves meaning, to be tested alongside the self-citation algorithm and Markov chain models of the VMS text across a wider range of statistical tests.

Even as we disagree, this is exactly the kind of conversation I wanted to spark: We are talking about the concrete properties of a concretely defined and falsifiable class of substitution cipher. As I say in the paper, all models are wrong, but some are useful. The Naibbe cipher is almost certainly wrong in important ways. That doesn't make it useless as a point of reference.