Wolfe's Attitude toward his Readers

Gwern Branwen · 14 Aug 2010, 20:14 · from 2010-August.txt.gz

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From: gwern0 at gmail.com (Gwern Branwen)
Date: Sat, 14 Aug 2010 16:14:46 -0400
Subject: (urth) Wolfe's Attitude toward his Readers
In-Reply-To: <SNT123-W3357051532538312747CC7CF990 at phx.gbl>
References: <SNT123-W3357051532538312747CC7CF990 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <AANLkTin_C6RxCujEwUHACN7CAb8j2KKSh=dK7oHyycvq at mail.gmail.com>

On Sat, Aug 14, 2010 at 2:41 PM, Lee Berman <severiansola at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>Gerry Quinn- But again - verisimiltude! ?Would Pas's engineers and quartemasters have
>>used strings of numbers, or a panoply of teratoid icons? ?I expect that
>>somewhere in Mainframe is a big list of what all vaults on the Whorl
>>originally contained, indexed by number. ?In a more controlled
>>disembarkation, instructions would be passed down regarding which were to be
>>opened.
>
> Gerry, thanks for the entropy explanation. I understand what you mean.
>
> Still having trouble with your verisimiltude. We understand that Wolfe shows us certain
> symbols that Severian or Silk is incapable of understanding. ?My gut feeling is still that
> if Wolfe wanted to depict a number sequence that WE also cannot understand then he would
> describe it that way: "He saw the Seal of Pas and it had a block of incomprehensibly organized
> numbers". From this description we just as easily can figure out they are vault container
> index numbers or whatever.
>
> By actually giving us the numbers, organized in sequence, I feel Wolfe is expecting us to be
> able to figure them out, even if Silk can't. In similar fashion I don't think Severian really
> knows what teratoid or gnostic symbols are. But WE can interpret that they mean there is
> something akin to monsters in Father Inire's wing of the House Absolute and that Witches deal
> in mysterious, arcane knowledge. If he called the symbols an ankh or a swastika, I think
> we would be expected to come to different conclusions.
>
> As the numbers are organized into 9 groups of four digits, and each group of four digits adds
> up to a number which is less than 27, my best guess is that it is a cryptogram. Perhaps it
> lists the initials of the 9 gods of the Whorl. Perhaps the cryptogram solves to the 9 letters-
> Typhon-Pas. Or perhaps it spells out the 9 letter name of the true monarch and creator of the
> Whorl, GENE WOLFE. We need more hidden wolves in Long Sun, don't we?
>
> But since I can't figure out a cryptogram from it that makes any of these work, I must defer to
> your explanation as the best working hypothesis we have going (that I know of).
>
> 5553 8783 4223 9700 34
> 2221 0401 1101 7276 56
> SEALED FOR THE MONARCH

I would like to be be 'Gene Wolfe' (he is the true monarch of the
books, after all!), but if that's the solution, the cipher must be
fairly complex - not a straight substitution. Notice that 'Gene Wolfe'
has 3 'e's in it, while there's not a single repeated 4 or 2-digit
group.

Staring, I don't see any interesting regularities. There is one
repetition in the sum of each group: [18,26,11,16,7,7,5,3,22,21]. mod
10 doesn't show anything interesting: [8,6,1,6,7,7,5,3,2,1]. mod 2:
[0,0,1,0,1,1,1,1,0,1]. If we drop the 2 2-digit groups to get
00101110, that's an ASCII '-',  decimal 046, octal 056, and hex 02E.

Each group begins with a different number, covering 0-9 except for 6 -
which has bad connotations religiously, of course. As for end-digits,
the 3x2 grid on the left all end in odd numbers - 3 or 1, while the
2x2 block on the right ends in the even numbers 0, 4, 6. But there is
so little to go on that this could just be numerology.

-- 
gwern

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