1 hour ago
The two articles referenced in the 'Coda' section are also quite interesting, expecially the first one about the Papal cipher. I was unaware there existed deliberately ambiguos ciphers where the decrypter had to supply additional information (mostly by his knowledge of the language) for a successful decryption. My guess (but just a guess) is this reduces the entropy of the encrypted text, given information has been removed from it, so this might be relevant to the VMS too (not that I'm endorsing the cipher hypotheses, I'm pretty much agnostic at the moment).