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Scrambled text

There's this thing going around on Facebook suggesting you are smart if you can read a paragaph where the middle letters of the words are scrambled.

Everything old is new again, since I remember reading about this in 2003. As far as I remember being able to read the scrambled text was not related to intelligence in any way.

Anyway, as a Friday afternoon distraction I wrote a little javascript to scramble text.

PlainScrambled
Scramble It

Ahh, the good-olde Fisher-Yates shuffle algorithm, friend of the first year tutorial!

posted at: Fri, 12 Oct 2007 18:19 | in /code/web | permalink | add comment (4 others)

Posted by Stephen Quinney at Fri Oct 12 18:55:58 2007

Maybe I'm dumb but my brain really couldn't decipher
"nah-neaitplboc ccaaerrhts" to make any real words, certainly not "non-alphabetic characters".

Posted by Pete Hardy at Fri Oct 12 19:53:19 2007

Yeah, I agree with Stephen. It should probably not mix letters across the hyphen.

Posted by Nicholas FitzRoy-Dale at Fri Oct 12 21:43:09 2007

Language Log did an interesting post on this. Turns out that some types of scrambling are easier to read than other types:

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004103.html

Posted by nate at Sat Oct 13 16:48:13 2007

"nah-neaitplboc ccaaerrhts"

That's because it's not correctly scrambled. In this case 'non-aplhanumeric' is two words, not one. :)\

(sorry if the human mind doesn't follow the rules of english)

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