outer@utcsrgv.UUCP (Richard Outerbridge) (10/12/84)
An acquaintance of mine has been doing work on the Beale ciphers, and has asked me to appeal to net-land for any programs that perform stylistic analysis of text. He's trying to prove the ciphers are a hoax. Here's an excerpt from the letter he sent me: "Two texts allegedly written by two different people are involved but I suspect that both were written by the same author. From a layman's reading I understand that a comparison should be made of words common to both writers, the number used by only one author, occurences of certain words such as "and", "a", "an", "the" plus a comparison of the first, second and third words used in each sentance. We have already made an analysis of the average number of words used in a sentance the hard way -- counting by hand -- and found an average sentance word length of 28.82 in one and 28.75 in the other. Theses figures are close enough to believe our suspicion is correct. But, now we need a computer program for the other analyses. Any suggestions, leads, etc., would be appreciated... results would be used in a follow-up article in *Cryptologia* magazine." Well gang, how about it? Anyone know of, or have, any programs that might be of use? I've heard that some religious BBS do this sort of thing to show that divine revelation (not to mention the translator!) was responsible for all of the Bible. Mail replies to me and if there's enough interest I'll summarize to net.crypt. Thanks. -- Richard Outerbridge <outer@utcsrgv.UUCP> 416 978 2742 Payload Deliveries: N 41 39'36", W 79 23'42", Elev. 106.47m.