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scrmable [Sat, 13-Sep-2003 12:53 PM]
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[music |Cibo Matto -- Blue Train]

One of the memes making the rounds in the last couple days goes:

"Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a total 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."

I haven't found a link to the research (if there actually is any) but I did write a little perl script, scrmable, to test the hypothesis. It wroks pertty good!

I think the scrmabled words taht are least readable are the ones that end up with a lot of consecutive vowels, or that split the initial phoneme.

Update: March of teh Slashdorks!

linkReply

Comments:
[User Picture]From: [info]altamira16
Sat, 13-Sep-2003 1:06 PM (UTC)

Funny, I saw it like this.

(Link)

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe.

Clearly there is some university morphing going on in this study.
[User Picture]From: [info]jwz
Sat, 13-Sep-2003 1:12 PM (UTC)

Re: Funny, I saw it like this.

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Yeah, that sort of thing always happens with things like this.

I wonder: did someone change it from Cambridge, in an attempt to add "clarity", or did they change it to Cambridge to add more fictitious authority?

Either way, I'm betting there was no such "study", just someone noting a neat trick. (The difference between those? "Funding.")
[User Picture]From: [info]caitlinburke
Sat, 13-Sep-2003 1:27 PM (UTC)

Re: Funny, I saw it like this.

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There is data or at least reported experience, of varying quality, on this phenomenon in general. It is the basic idea behind the deprecated "see and say" or "whole word" method of teaching kids to read in a sort of scanning approach instead of taking the trouble to teach them to sound words out.

White it's great that the brain can compensate so easily for imperfect use of symbols to represent words, this really only works for readers who already know the words. Unfamiliar words in languages that use alphabets can more easily be decoded by people who learn to read phonetically. (And I suspect that research would show that this is true for scrmabled words, too, since "see and say" learners confuse words with similar shapes more easily.)
[User Picture]From: [info]caitlinburke
Sat, 13-Sep-2003 1:30 PM (UTC)

Re: Funny, I saw it like this.

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"While" of course, not "white," but it's probably as easy to read it properly as it was to mistype it -- possibly easier.
[User Picture]From: [info]ralesk
Sat, 13-Sep-2003 1:28 PM (UTC)

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That said I have an acquaintance on one of the messengers who types similarly.  Not with this many letter-swapping, but to add to the problems, some spacing is in the wron gplace.  I'd say I'm pretty trained…

From: [info]etcetera5
Sat, 13-Sep-2003 1:55 PM (UTC)

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had no trouble at all reading your post.. how great is that!
[User Picture]From: [info]king_mob
Sat, 13-Sep-2003 2:41 PM (UTC)

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# Premssioin to use, cpoy, mdoify, drusbiitte, and slel this stafowre and its
# docneimuatton for any prsopue is hrbeey ganrted wuihott fee, prveodid taht
# the avobe cprgyioht noicte appaer in all coipes and that both taht
# cohgrypit noitce and tihs premssioin noitce aeppar in suppriotng
# dcoumetioantn. 

You are the wind beneath my wings.

[User Picture]From: [info]kylec
Sat, 13-Sep-2003 2:49 PM (UTC)

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hah, I was waiting for someone to do a perl version, I did it last night in php :)

http://junglist.org/jumble.php

src: http://junglist.org/jumble.phps
[User Picture]From: [info]phyxeld
Sun, 14-Sep-2003 4:28 AM (UTC)

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In the interest of multiple implementations, here's an abbreviated perl version, almost suitable for -e action:
#!/usr/bin/perl -p
# slcrambe.pl - by phyxeld. Inspired by http://www.jwz.org/hacks/scrmable.pl
$A=50; s{(?<=\W\w)(\w\w+)(?=\w\W)}{ # A=0: no shuffle; A=100: all backwards;
my $s; $s= rand(100) > $A ? qq|$s$_| : qq|$_$s| for (split //, $1); $s; }eg;
same usage as jwz's, plus the addition of $A with which you can adjust how much it shuffles...
[User Picture]From: [info]ronbar
Sun, 14-Sep-2003 10:34 AM (UTC)

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One-liner inverse bubblesorts like this are what drive control freaks toward python. Real one-liners don't use 'my'.

Just to add my own control freak issue, the ? control operator (not the regex operator) should be illegal, or at least cause you to get lots of parking tickets.
[User Picture]From: [info]jwz
Sun, 14-Sep-2003 12:02 PM (UTC)

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Get the fuck out of my house. I won't have that kind of talk in here.
[User Picture]From: [info]brad
Sat, 13-Sep-2003 3:44 PM (UTC)

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Love the code. :)

[User Picture]From: [info]suppafly
Sat, 13-Sep-2003 6:04 PM (UTC)

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need to replace the lj spell checker with this..
[User Picture]From: [info]stimps
Sat, 13-Sep-2003 4:18 PM (UTC)

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I can certainly read it. It just drives me insane to do so. It's WRONG, damn it! =)
[User Picture]From: [info]kiad
Sat, 13-Sep-2003 4:19 PM (UTC)

it would be cool if it were actual research...

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I have written about 5 different applications, but none of them are useful or significant for me to commit to a lj comment.

Did you come up with any?
[User Picture]From: [info]ronbar
Sat, 13-Sep-2003 4:27 PM (UTC)

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Of course a Lisp programmer would write a script to modify itself.

Did you cheat and name the functions manually? Or did you write the script, then write another script to do a global shuffle and replace on function and variable names to scrmable.pl?

I'm guessing you cheated; that would optimize for laziness. If you didn't cheat, I hope I don't have to look at any of your source code in the near future.
[User Picture]From: [info]violentbloom
Sat, 13-Sep-2003 5:39 PM (UTC)

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at least he got rid of his lisp machines.
[User Picture]From: [info]phygelus
Sat, 13-Sep-2003 9:33 PM (UTC)

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he got rid of his lisp machines? say it isn't so!
say, how IS emacs on a lisp machine keyboard?
[User Picture]From: [info]violentbloom
Sat, 13-Sep-2003 10:50 PM (UTC)

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I'm not sure they actually ever ran.
besides I'm in the vi camp. :P I prefer less bells and wistles on my editor.

So I just read the script to casablanca. It was TYPED on a typewriter in 1942 then I presume it's been photocopied to death for the last 60 years...it was a nightmare to read. First e turns into something that could be an o or maybe something else and lots of the charactor set like g in example get very hard to read with an old font set and bits missing (added ink blobs too) from photocopying. So you would think that if reading by shape helped with ignoring the misspelling (there was plenty of typos too) it wouldn't have been a big deal as the shape of most of the badly photocopied pages should be the same. But it made it quite difficult to read actually. I read at 690 words a minute which should put me in the read by shape camp, but now I wonder. I certainly didn't read that fast tonight. It took me an hour and 50 minutes to read 147 pages of script (which have more than normal amounts of blank space due to formating) so that's quite a lot slower than normal for me. It did matter that the details were not filled in.
[User Picture]From: [info]jwz
Sun, 14-Sep-2003 1:45 AM (UTC)

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I gave them to Noah, because he was likely to provide them with a more nurturing home than I. And yes, they worked, though something new tended to go wrong with the hardware each time I powered them up... They were not made to last.

Lispm Emacs was ZMACS (ZWEI), and it was great: nearly every user-visible feature I added to Lucid Emacs (font-lock mode, active regions, etc.) was cribbed from there.

I wonder how the Explorer emulator project is going... (Page last modified April 2002, says it's not booting all the way yet.)
[User Picture]From: [info]jwz
Sat, 13-Sep-2003 7:28 PM (UTC)

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Hey, I only "cheated" in that, if you scrmable the Perl reserved wrods, it doesn't run so good.
[User Picture]From: [info]ronbar
Sun, 14-Sep-2003 10:25 AM (UTC)

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I was going to say that modifying the script a bit to change only non-reserved words would be easy except for ignoring reserved words, but then I realized how big an exception that is. So I think you should write it in Python instead. Python makes everything all better. And write the web version in PHP and use procmail to filter those evites.
From: [info]grayscalewolf
Sun, 14-Sep-2003 10:58 AM (UTC)

(Link)

Rather than teaching the script how to parse Perl, you could teach the script to ask Perl how the text will be parsed, and if a particular permutation changes the meaning of a text, undo it. The tricky part is making this efficient for large input texts.

And then you have a source code shrouder. Another interesting constraint is to make it reversible if you know the seed for the PRNG.
[User Picture]From: [info]greyface
Sat, 13-Sep-2003 5:40 PM (UTC)

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The problem with the article is this phrase "The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm." Without problem does not solely imply "with success." The fact is, it takes longer, and more energy to read things that are less correct.

Cognitive Scientists (I have a degree in it, but am not really one of them) can explain it all pretty easily. Research shows that people decide what letter a given inscribed symbol is, by the inscribed symbols around it... so it wouldn't surprise me if the same went for words.

There's also all that research that shows that after sufficient training in reading, people read words when they see them, even if they are trying not to. Anyway, it's cute, and funny, but far from ground-breaking science.

The script however, is genius... if geniuses HATE ALL LIFE.
[User Picture]From: [info]chronicfreetime
Sat, 13-Sep-2003 9:38 PM (UTC)

(Link)

Funny, people never believe me when I tell them I have no choice but to read subtitles if they are present. (And then I notice differences between the subtitles and the audio, which drive me nuts.)
[User Picture]From: [info]pne
Sun, 14-Sep-2003 5:16 AM (UTC)

looking at a word without reading it

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There's also all that research that shows that after sufficient training in reading, people read words when they see them, even if they are trying not to.

Probably different for dyslexics (who, as I understand it, read "differently" from other people anyway) - my wife says she can look at words without reading them unless she chooses to. I think I can't do that.
[User Picture]From: [info]pthalogreen
Sun, 14-Sep-2003 7:01 AM (UTC)

Re: looking at a word without reading it

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i am not dyslexic (But i had to look at your comment in order to spell it), and I can generally choose not to read words if I see them, but it takes conscious effort to choose not, rather than to choose to.

what i can't seem to do, is listen to kamilla talking in english while trying to read in Hungarian. or to read in hungarian while listening to english music.
[User Picture]From: [info]soleklypse
Wed, 1-Oct-2003 9:25 PM (UTC)

Re: looking at a word without reading it

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There's something called the Stroop effect where they show you words like "red" or "green" but write the word "red" with green ink, etc. and ask you to name the color ink. Everyone (with rare and highly notable exceptions) finds it much more difficult to name the color of a word that says a color other than the one it's written in. In other words, if you see "car" written in green, you will say "green" much faster than if you see the word "red" written in green. This effect is one of the most well documented and repeatable experiments in social psychology. I don't know if they've tried it with dyslexics though.
[User Picture]From: [info]abates
Sat, 13-Sep-2003 11:23 PM (UTC)

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Meanwhile a hundred internet spelling pedants are having seizures.
[User Picture]From: [info]scjody
Sun, 14-Sep-2003 12:24 AM (UTC)

bihullst

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< stewie> Email from dan:16:34

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is that frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae.

The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm.

Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe.
< mostafah> bihullst16:38
[User Picture]From: [info]enf
Sun, 14-Sep-2003 4:14 PM (UTC)

(Link)

Have you seen the letter from Chuck Moore when the Forth standards committee proposed matching against entire tokens instead of the first three characters and character count?

It begins:

Dea- Edi---

I am afr--- tha- the let--- in the las- iss-- abo-- for-- inc- usi-- onl- thr-- let--- nam- fie--- has had the opp----- eff--- fro- wha- the wri--- wan---

(from the second ACM History of Programming Languages conference proceedings)
[User Picture]From: [info]l2g
Mon, 15-Sep-2003 9:11 AM (UTC)

Re: This is perl, v5.8.0 built for i386-linux-thread-multi

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I can't seem to rdpruocee the plbroem.
I can't seem to rcoeuprde the plberom.
I can't seem to rpoucdere the perbolm.
I can't seem to rroedpcue the plrebom.
I can't seem to rcedorupe the peblorm.
I can't seem to rcodrepue the pbelrom.
I can't seem to rdpoceure the prelobm.
I can't seem to rrcouedpe the plorbem.
I can't seem to rdupcreoe the pbrloem.

And I hvae the same voesirn of Prel.

[User Picture]From: [info]itumanov
Mon, 15-Sep-2003 12:03 AM (UTC)

pointers to possible sources

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[User Picture]From: [info]l2g
Mon, 15-Sep-2003 9:23 AM (UTC)

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As words get lngeor, it bomeecs icsiarelgnny dfflciiut for one's mnatel fcliaetus to ctllpomeey irgnoe the agmmntciaaaarl oufotsacbin. Eeatvllnuy it bmceeos an eeexigncldy hoodunrres chagnelle (touhgh not an ugnlltcceioraay ilrcaanbtte one).

[User Picture]From: [info]livejournalsux
Mon, 15-Sep-2003 9:29 AM (UTC)

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Now all we need is comilers recognize code written this way.
[User Picture]From: [info]l2g
Mon, 15-Sep-2003 11:12 AM (UTC)

Tentatively suggested patch

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--- scrmable.orig.pl    2003-09-15 08:59:09.000000000 -0700
+++ scrmable.pl 2003-09-15 11:05:21.000000000 -0700
@@ -27,9 +27,7 @@
         my $Z = pop @w;
         print $A;
         if (defined ($Z)) {
-          my %tt;
-          foreach (@w) { $tt{$_} = rand; }
-          @w = sort { $tt{$a} <=> $tt{$b}; } @w;
+          @w = sort { rand() <=> rand() } @w;
           foreach (@w) {
             print $_;
           }

Doesn't change the functionality, just makes it a tad clearer and shorter.

[User Picture]From: [info]jwz
Mon, 15-Sep-2003 11:25 AM (UTC)

Re: Tentatively suggested patch

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sort algorithms are likely to misbehave if you change the sort key partway through.

Though I see the latest Perl FAQ recommends yet a different way.
[User Picture]From: [info]l2g
Mon, 15-Sep-2003 12:01 PM (UTC)

Re: Tentatively suggested patch

(Link)

Do you mean "misbehave" in a way other than "not get the sort order right"?
[User Picture]From: [info]jwz
Mon, 15-Sep-2003 12:07 PM (UTC)

Re: Tentatively suggested patch

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What other way would there be for a sort algorithm to misbehave? Changing the key could screw up the O(n) nature or could leave big pieces unsorted, depending on the implementation. Since we're only sorting ~8 elements at a time, it's the last one that matters.
[User Picture]From: [info]l2g
Mon, 15-Sep-2003 12:37 PM (UTC)

Re: Tentatively suggested patch

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Ah, I see. Since randomizing is the point, I was confused as to why a flaw in the sort order would matter. :-)

Thank you, O wise guru!
[User Picture]From: [info]hotabay
Wed, 17-Sep-2003 8:23 PM (UTC)

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I can read it, but it gives me a headache. Makes me feel dyslexic.
[User Picture]From: [info]kiad
Sat, 20-Sep-2003 7:40 AM (UTC)

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So, this was brought up in my Complexity class. They wondered about a senario:

Would the Declaration of Independance still be recognisable or even perhaps readable (from memory?) if the first and last letters of every word were intact, but random letters were inserted between the first and last.
I can't believe this is actually a class topic. Insanity.
[User Picture]From: [info]pur_angst
Wed, 24-Sep-2003 1:30 PM (UTC)

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obviously you go to a better school, or just have higher standards for topics in class... here at the wonderful lake superior state university, i'm lucky if we talk about Perl in the Perl class...
[User Picture]From: [info]kiad
Wed, 24-Sep-2003 4:52 PM (UTC)

Some cool answers found to this problem

(Link)

I really love my school- it is sort of like a mini-grad school. I recommend applying! www.bennington.edu.

Regarding the word scramble, this weblog has some great information about it. It is totally not true that if you modify the internal letters but keep the two leading and ending letter that it remains readable.

I've put my favourite part of the blog here
http://www.livejournal.com/users/kiad/341002.html
[User Picture]From: [info]sidelobe
Sun, 21-Sep-2003 6:43 PM (UTC)

New function for spelling checkers?

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Ya really gotta wonder if this could be a new avenue for spelling checkers and spelling fixers. Add the function to fix misplace dspaces and you'd really have something!