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What is the Unicity Distance covered by the Moving Goalpost?

Maybe the real unicity distance was the number of goalposts we mangled along the way

As outlined previously, the original challenge was clear: decipher the Constitution of the United States beyond a certain “Unicity Distance.”

Simple enough, right?

Well, not quite.

In addition to the predictable skirmishes over what exactly constitutes the unicity distance (see here for the carnage), our good friend Yajñadevam (should I use IAST here, as this is not a proper Sanskrit word?) has taken to shifting the goalposts like he’s training for a World Cup penalty shootout.

This page chronicles the colorful history of those shifting promises, redefinitions, and outright teleportations of the original challenge. Think of it as a running scoreboard for Pāṇinian Calvinball.

Goalpost #1: “Can you decipher the US Constitution as Sanskrit?”

Why did Yajnadevam challenge us to read the U.S. Constitution as Sanskrit in the first place?

We had privately pointed out serious flaws in his so-called “decipherments” of the Indus script: they were barely grammatical, filled with unattested words, generally meaningless, and relied heavily on special pleading: often labeling an incorrect form as “Vedic” simply because it showed up once in an obscure corner of one hymn.

We examined his method in detail and found deeper, systematic problems. Most notably, his dictionary was fundamentally flawed: it consisted only of raw stems and verbal roots as listed in the Monier-Williams key. These abstract forms (not words) are explicitly forbidden from appearing in actual Sanskrit speech or writing. In effect, from the very beginning, he was “deciphering” using a wordlist that couldn’t possibly produce a single valid Sanskrit word. (This likely deserves its own page or atleast section; we shall elaborate on this at a later time. We have now elaborated on this here)

Rather than acknowledge these foundational issues or address the blatant grammatical problems, he began throwing around information theory jargon instead. According to him, his “decipherments” of the IVC script as “Sanskrit” are mathematically valid because they cross the unicity distance: the threshold beyond which, in information theory, only a unique key can recover meaningful plaintext. However, as we’ve demonstrated here, these grammatical flaws cannot be waved away using information theory; Information theory cannot and does not establish meaningfulness, in fact, it presupposes it.

As a corollary, he argued that if the key is wrong, you simply won’t be able to read the ciphertext beyond the unicity distance. For example, if we tried reading something obviously not Sanskrit like the U.S. Constitution, as “Sanskrit” using some false key, the decipherment should fail before the unicity distance. This, according to him, follows from basic properties of information theory: natural languages have redundancy (typically around 0.7), and that limits how much meaningful text a wrong key can accidentally produce.

The U.S. Constitution was chosen because its length is roughly comparable to the IVC corpus. So, if we were able to decode the Constitution alone (beyond the unicity distance) as “valid” Sanskrit, it would directly falsify the reasoning behind his decipherment claims.

So that’s exactly what we did:

Goalpost #2: “But Can You Read Jefferson’s Papers?”

After the Constitution was deciphered (cleanly, and beyond the unicity distance), the response wasn’t acknowledgment. Instead, the challenge immediately pivoted to:

Frankly, this was almost insulting.

The Jefferson papers use the same language, style, and vocabulary as the Constitution. If our key can decipher one, it can handle the other. So rather than wasting time on Jefferson, we deciphered his own tweet.

For good measure, we also deciphered Twitter brainrot, which, given how different it is from standard English, effectively reads like a separate dialect. Naturally, it came out as a Dravidian dialect of Sanskrit:


And to round things off, we deciphered Nietzsche, straight from the original German, into fluent, grammatical “Sanskrit”. Just to underscore what divinely revealed keys are capable of.

While this particular challenge came from his followers and not YD himself, it was just the opening act. The real goalpost gymnastics were still to come, courtesy of Yajnadevam directly.

Goalpost #3: “But What About These Specific Words?”

After the US Constitution, modern English, Twitter brainrot, and even Nietzsche weren’t enough, the goalpost drifted again.

This time, YD began throwing out specific English words for me to decipher. The logic? Unclear. But the pattern was crystal: the challenge kept getting pettier, more arbitrary, and increasingly detached from anything he himself had ever attempted:


And here’s the kicker: the IVC script doesn’t even use spaces. YD has never deciphered isolated words from that corpus — only loose sentence-length blobs. His own method has no mechanism for word-boundaries.

But now, suddenly, my system was expected to do that. A new goalpost, freshly forged, and as always, one he wouldn’t dare apply to himself.

But of course, we translated those words as well. This time not with supernatural help, but perfectly natural; even botanical.

Goalpost #4: “Alright, But What About DLUUUDZY?”

Just when you thought the goalpost couldn’t move any further, it crossed the Atlantic. Now the challenge was to decipher random Polish words.


No context. No connection to the original task. Just… Polish. There was no longer any pretense of symmetry: YD has never produced anything close to this level of specificity. Yet, somehow, this was now the standard.

Goalpost #5: “Now Go the Other Way”

At this point, the goalpost had clearly given up on subtlety.


Of course.

Having deciphered English as Sanskrit, the next demand was to reverse it. Because obviously गच्छति should map cleanly to… something.

It’s unclear why this is necessary. Maybe, after so many acrobatics, the goalposts just wanted my key to spin too. Maybe it was something else entirely. I guess we’ll never know.

Goalpost #6: “But एएएएएए”

By now, the argument had fully devolved into its purest form: an incoherent scream of pure noise. The argument had now shifted from deciphering the U.S. Constitution to “You can’t read this specific nonsense string I just made up that doesn’t exist in any language.”


Sigh. I just prayed to the Goddess:

अये! अये अयै 🙏
O Mover (f)! I must go into good fortune. (Raghu 4.26)

Perhaps, in hindsight, the real challenge was never about crossing unicity distance on the US constitution: It was to cross the unicity distance covered by these magnificently dancing goalposts!

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