Further to my posting yesterday about how we recognise words, here’s something from Mike Masnick, who runs the excellent Techdirt blog:I saw your other post on the mixed up letters, which I agree is absolutely fascinating. I had posted something similar about a year ago. Which also didn’t have a source associated with it, though, it appears to come from the same basic idea. Someone posted a comment on that post recently, saying it was written in a letter to New Scientist.At the time, I also wondered if such things could be useful as a sort of Turing test to fool a computer, but still have a human know perfectly well what you were talking about.Randomly, I also sent it to my parents when I first came across it. When I was a kid, they were very concerned with the way I learned to read, since I apparently would just look at the first two letters of a word and its length and then “guess” at what the word was. Apparently, that might not be so weird…
Thanks, Mike. I reckon we’re definitely onto something here. Sadly, the only use I can think of for it so far is for spammers, who already misspell words to fool spam filters. I can imagine their pitches: Wroreid aobut szie? Dpesresd by prferaomcne? Ok that took me a couple of minutes to do. This took me two seconds: Werorid by szie? Depersesd by prcaremfone? Courtesy of a funky site called Lerfjhax which lets you type in text and get a scrambled version out. Watch out for another wvae of sapm.