The Pāṇini Protocol: The Complete Saga from Challenge to Block

This is the full account of the Pāṇini Protocol: a scholarly encounter that began in good faith, passed the fire of public challenge, and ended in evasive silence. It is a case study in how a publicity-driven claim, never meant to withstand academic scrutiny, folds when it meets formal critique.

Prologue: “Perhaps This Is All A Misunderstanding”

December 2024 - February 2025

Early reactions to Yajnadevam’s claims were cautious, even generous. What he prsented as “Sanskrit” showed clear grammatical faults — but many assumed the information theoretic basis was sound.

We reached out in good faith:


Despite the long discussions in these threads [1], [2] (which were met with increasingly dismissive replies) we continued the conversation in private. There, we pointed out several key issues: the language lacked a consistent case system and verbal conjugation, phoneme frequencies resembled no form of Sanskrit (as later rigorously shown by @khoomeik), and the translations lacked grammar.

Upon reviewing his method, we found his “dictionary” turned out to be just a list of stems — not actual words. We urged him to try using a real one.

To summarize, our core claim was:

  1. Yajnadevam’s outputs aren’t Sanskrit — they violate basic grammar
  2. His method is so unconstrained that anything can be force-fitted as ungrammatical “Sanskrit”

To the first point, he replied “You don’t know what the Harappans wrote”. This dodges the issue. If the result is claimed to be Sanskrit, it must follow Sanskrit grammar — not hypothetical Harappan usage.

To the second, he replied with a dismissive challenge: “Decipher the US Constitution as Sanskrit”. This was likely meant to shut us up.

Instead, we took it seriously.

The Seeds of the Pāṇini Protocol

07 July 2025

We applied his method (including his own phoneme classing, ungrammatical constructs, and reliance on unicity distance) to the U.S. Constitution. We used the key revealed to us by Thomas Jefferson in a dream to decode and translate the United States Constitution well past the unicity dsitance he set at the time:


The results looked exactly like his: ungrammatical Sanskrit, vague stems, and a total absence of structure. In other words, it worked.

Thus began the Pāṇini Protocol: which would soon become a full-scale demonstration that any text, when tortured through his method, can yield “Sanskrit” that’s just as ungrammatical as his original. What follows is a surprisingly textbook progression through all five stages of grief, triggered by Jefferson’s Key working too well.

Chapter 1: Denial

Initial Skepticism and Bewilderment

08 July 2025

The initial reaction from Yajnadevam and his supporters was one of confusion and disbelief, a kind of collective bewilderment. For reasons still unclear, they were unable to process the fact that a dhoti-clad Pikachu had received a magic phoneme key from Thomas Jefferson in a dream and then used it to decipher the U.S. Constitution.

This produced some charming moments where a few in the audience simply forgot to scroll:


While others remained in incredulity, firmly believing that the key’s success was a fluke:


To quell such doubts about the efficiacy of Jefferson’s Key, we used it to produce translations not only of the critic’s own tweet, but also of Twitter brainrot:


Early Foreshadowing

Yajnadevam himself, was apparently on vacation and had not read my decipherment yet. Nevertheless, he quickly surfaced to confidently announce that my unicity distance was wrong:


The lowercase complaint was a complete red herring. The ciphertext under consideration was entirely uppercase to begin with (in scriptio continua too, like the Indus seals), making the objection moot. The “LL to A” point was (apart from being flatly false) equally hollow, given his own decipherment tolerates far sloppier symbol clustering. In hindsight, this irrelevant objection, and a misrepresentation of my position as “a challenge to information theory” foreshadowed the wave of goalpost-shifting that would soon follow.

Still Unconvinced?! Sigh…

09-10 July 2025

While Yajnadevam was still on vacation and hadn’t yet read the decipherment, his followers remained unconvinced. They couldn’t bring themselves to believe that my key was actually revealed in a dream and hence magical — perhaps imagining that I had brute-forced some “algorithm” on a “dataset” or whatever else made it easier to sleep at night. At first, we were responding to these doubts individually:


But soon, this became tedious and frankly, beneath us. So we went straight for the final nail in the coffin, and translated Nietzsche’s German:


Initial “Rebuttals” That Exposed the Blueprint

09-10 July 2025

Two days after the decipherment, the responses began to shift from knee-jerk dismissal to actual engagement. But most critiques ended up questioning assumptions that were straight out of Yajnadevam’s own method — effectively dismantling the very thesis they were trying to defend.

For example, Yajnadevam claimed that my unicity distance was “much larger than the constitution, perhaps much much larger” ([1],[2]), without providing a number or even a formula. Ironically, I had computed the unicity distance using the same method in his draft, making the objection an inadvertent admission that his formula was flawed. He would later concede this in opaque terms:


Still unwilling to accept that Jefferson’s Key had actually worked, Yajnadevam tried to move the goalpost by demanding that my method work for any Latin alphabet text. Meanwhile, some of his followers began innovating novel approaches to deflect from the results, like questioning the entropy of the translations and demanding Sanskrit be reverse-translated with my key, while others admitted to lacking technical competence in arithmetic:

division error tweet


In parallel, some began pointing out what they saw as glaring flaws: the key had ambiguous phoneme classes, many-to-many mappings ([1],[2],[3]), and other such horrors. Unfortunately for them, these were faithful imitations of Yajnadevam’s method. In trying to critique our work, they accidentally spotlighted the nonsensical mechanics of his entire system:


The Challenge Ascends to Mythical Status

10 July 2025

At this point, rather than admit the demonstration succeeded, Yajnadevam launched into monologue:


Apparently, I had become the final boss who had challenged information theory itself. In truth, all I did was point out what any honest student of Sanskrit and mathematics could have. This refutation was the casual work of a bored student over a weekend, not some grand academic takedown.

Yet, our method turned out to be effective enough to trigger a meltdown. And who doesn’t enjoy a bit of drama? Naturally, we grabbed the opportunity, and that’s how the Pāṇini Protocol was born: