Comment from Truth on September 16, 2003 03:12 AM

It’s eaceillonptxy aidnnostug how many sdeloppsuy kabdeegollnwe scceiimnooooc choorts will slrup up uabeinrtttud pcdeeiiinossstuc maaeklry.

Order doesn’t matter, huh? “English University”, huh? WOW, well if someone you probably don’t even know tells you that someone told them that it happened at an English University, then it must be true!!

Dollars to donuts it’s an urban myth and will show up on snopes.com soon.

Granted, the topic is very interesting. But don’t take the story hook line and sinker.

-Truth

…but then again…

Comment from Martin on September 16, 2003 08:50 PM

Understanding the context is key!

From: Restoring the Vision, Government Technology Volume 16 Issue 12 Aug 3 p15 sidebar

A phenotropics presentation Jaron Lanier gave at the University of California at Berkeley included the following quote, for which no origin is found.

“? … randomising letters in the middle of words [has] little or no effect on the ability of skilled readers to understand the text. This is easy to denmtrasote. In a pubiltacion of New Scnieitst you could ramdinose all the letetrs, keipeng the first two and last two the same, and reibadailty would hadrly be aftcfeed. My ansaylis did not come to much beucase the thoery at the time was for shape and senqeuce retigcionon. Saberi’s work sugsegts we may have some pofrweul palrlael prsooscers at work. The resaon for this is suerly that idnetiyfing coentnt by paarllel prseocsing speeds up regnicoiton. We only need the first and last two letetrs to spot chganes in meniang.? “

Lanier tied this quote to phenotropics by saying language theorists seem to make a mistake in assuming natural language is more like computer language than it probably is.

My phenotropic work examines a radically anti-parse/anti-protocol approach to computer science,? he said. ?I naturally wonder if natural language can also be understood with less reference to the kinds of structure usually found somewhat in common between it and traditional computer science. What if comprehension could survive all manner of scrambling, particularly of word order and word variation choice, like tense? My hypothesis is that even a tiny amount of the mysterious element we call ?context? can correct even very high levels of scrambling.?