Wow, what an interesting point. I wonder if this would weigh in on "event" perception as the beginning and end are what dominate with a mishmash containing the general letters within. I would expect this would break down if the syntax was mangled
Yes, redundancies of language obviously play an important role.
as the events were framed within a meaningful sequence expressing some program that was earmakred at the beginning: a report. See below.
olny wahtto sitll ina mnid aoccdrnig rset rscheearch lsatat rghit you cmabrigde.
only what to still in a mind according rest researchch (sic) last at right you Cambridge ?
There are some problems here in addition to scrambling of syntax.
A brute force algorithm:
1. Alphabetize the letters in each word. This provides a search string (index tag) for the word.
2. Look up each index tag in a lexicon constructed in the manner of (1), where for each index string of letters in alphabetical order there is listed all the words that match. (I used to have a dictionary of this sort, created for scrabble players.)
3. Try each combination of resulting words until one works.
Our brains are obviously not doing (1) and (2), but something like (3) is surely part of the mix (statistical learning theory).
Note that the alphabatized strings of letters are not readable.
aabeeihlptz eht eelrstt in aceh dorw hist deioprsv a acehrs ginrst for eht dorw.
Too great a breach of morpheme boundaries. If you keep the first and last letters constant but alphabatize the inner letters (or reverse alphabetize if the result would be no change) it is much more readable, but still not as readable as the example making the rounds in email:
aabeihlptze the leertts in each wrod tihs pdeiorvs a sacerh sinrtg for the wrod.
So, although stability of the end letters is important, it's clearly not the case that any ordering of the remaining letters is equally readable.
I think a selectionist algorithm like OT is the ticket.
/B
ยทยทยท
At 11:57 AM 9/19/2003 -0400, you wrote:
No more words, it seems.
mmm?
regardless, very neat example.
isaac