Can You Raed Tihs?

An aoynmnuos raeedr sumbtis: "An interesting tidbit from Bisso's blog site: Scrambled words are legible as long as first and last letters are in place. Word of mouth has spread to other blogs, and articles as well. From the languagehat site: '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 porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe. ceehiro.' Jamie Zawinski has also written a perl script to convert normal text into text where letters excluding the first and last are scrambled."

Comments

Here you go

[JM Apocalypse]

No need to open the terminal ... Jeff comes to the rescue!

http://jeff.zoplionah.com/scramble.php

Re:Yes, a cat's got my tongue, OK?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, does this work well with letter pairs like, "th ch wh sh qu?" I forget what those are called.

Digraphs?

Re:Yes, a cat's got my tongue, OK?

[edwdig]

By randomly scrambling the letters, you're eliminating a lot of the redundancy.

Huffman compression would be unaffected though, as it works on a per character basis.

Compression worse...

[douglips]

That's easy. Let's say you have a text file that consists of 14,000 instances of the word "begat". This compresses to a file that simply indicates "repeat 14,000 'begat '".

Now, after you scrmable it, it's got equal quantities of begat, beagt, baget, baegt, bgeat, and bgaet. It's not so easy to compress any more.

Essentially, you're increasing the entropy of the file by a fair amount. Truly random data is not so easy to compress as english, because english has lots of order. Added disorder or entropy means compression is just not as easy.