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Harvard physicist's take on the VMS
(18-10-2026, 03:22 PM)dashstofsk wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.People who believe in the meaningless text / artificial construction / hoax hypothesis have suggested many 'whys'. ( See something of my own 'why' [ You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. ]. )
Many "why" may have been suggested, but they are not convincing when examined closely.  

Generally, one problem is explaining why the Author would have chosen a complicated method that produced text that did not look like language, while having so many statistical properties of a natural language -- which no one at that time would notice, and would not know how to ensure.

By the way, "artificial construction" is a more general term that does not imply meaningless text.  The Book of Soyga is a 100% artificial construction that has at least one obvious meaning: illustrate and explore that particular totally mechanical text generation method, that produced quite intriguing and varied results from a six-letter seed word.  Stephen "Mathematica" Wolfram filled a hefty book with basically a modern recreation of the Soyga tables.  Without getting significantly more illumination from them than the Soyga author did...

All the best, --stolfi
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RE: Harvard physicist's take on the VMS - by Jorge_Stolfi - 20-10-2026, 02:23 AM

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