who ndees sepell cechk?
I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdenieg. The phaonemneal pweor of the hmuan mnid. Aodccrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dnsoe’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 hmuan mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azmanig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuoht slpeling was ipmorantt!
Definitely an incredible mental trick, just begging to be the new ROT13. Spelling is still important, though, if only to allow disambiguation between words like ‘there’ and ‘three’. For instance, I actually read ‘frist’ instead of ‘first’ because it’s a common (if distasteful) word these days. Besides, how would I know if I left a letter out of ‘wfiociitikan’?
Comment by chris_radcliff — October 19, 2005 @ 2:22 pm
Not amazing, and not exclusively a testament to the power of the human mind.
Natural language is a code with a lot of redundancy. The Cambridge guys have defined a transformation which preserves important features of words; this makes it fairly easy for you to recognize the words.
Even without removing, adding, or changing letters, I can define a transformation which makes it MUCH harder to understand what you’re reading. Try this (same text as yours, different transformation):
I cdlnotu beeeilv ahtt I cdlou aaclltuy addennrstu ahtw I asw adeginr…
Incidentally, spell check might still be a good idea - notice that I’ve corrected a typo in your original posting
Comment by bob blakley — November 9, 2005 @ 10:18 am