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12 November 2005

Raed tihs… yuor mnid rokcs!

Cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid. Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt!

Tahnks, Rob Reid for frowradnig tihs one…  I’m ipmesrsed. Good lcuk wrtiing a comupter prorgam to do taht!

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  • William Shipley

    Nov 12 2005

    I’m not sure if you’re being facetious, but in fact it’d be easy, if you could solve the problem of computer reading in general (which is a big if). Which is to say, understanding the meaning of any given word in a sentence depends on the context of all the surrounding words already and our evaluation of the most likely meaning based on our culture: if I write “Mary had a little lamb” it’s not clear whether she owned a lamb or ate a lamb or had some sort of sexual congress with a lamb.

    Thus each word is more of a probability field (like an electron) than a point, in some virtual, n-dimensional meaning space, and the task is to write a program that can collapse all those fields.

    But if I had a program that could figure that out, it wouldn’t be any harder for me to understand jumbled or even misspelled words; computers would be very good at looking up all permutations of a word, they love brute-force algorithms. Really, for an n letter word, there are only ((n-1)! – 1) jumbles of that word ((n-1) because the first letter must be in the first spot, and -1 because one of the permutations is the correct spelling), which is a tiny number to a computer that can process billions of instructions per second.

    And if I hit on two possible interpretations for a word (words that were anagrams of each other) that’d just be an increase in the volume of the probability field for that word.

  • Chris Anderson

    Nov 12 2005

    You’re right… The mind’s genius is not in calculating anagrams, it’s in instantly picking the word that the context demands.

    eg. what word is ‘rsein’?

    The hgue red sun has rsein oevr the hrooizn

    The hgue redwood has rsein udner its brak

  • Chris Anderson

    Nov 12 2005

    So the mind isn’t just reading whole words at one bite, it’s whole sentences. At the very least, it’s giving words ‘provisional’ meaning which are only confirmed by reference to the whole sentence. Where’s Steve Pinker when you need him?

  • Chris Anderson

    Nov 12 2005

    Just did some googling and looks like this ‘meme’ has been doing the rounds for a few years… It contains truth, but not the whole truth. Check this out…

    http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/~mattd/Cmabrigde/


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