h a l f b a k e r yFewer ducks than estimates indicate.
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Take a word, say "word", list the ascii codes of its characters, say {119, 111, 114, 100}. Now take the first difference {-8, 3, -14}, followed by {11, -17} and finally {-28}. So "word" is sponsored by the numbers 4 (its length) and -28 (its 4th finite difference). Now set up a search engine that
seeks out and collects 4 letter words, another that collects words with nth finite difference of -28, and force them to share their intelligence with each other.
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Annotation:
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bena berm bevy cake cern chun cise club
dali fest fire fish flue gall hers idle
keld love mako moyo pahi pail pipi pouf
rain rine rist rote royt sell slur Tape
temp ting tora vair velo viol waeg waky
whop wild word |
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I fail to gain insight from this, but maybe you can sell it to a numerologist. |
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First Law of Feng Shui: stays in its element. |
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Forced intelligence is just wrong. |
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jutta: I think you misplaced your annotation... it obviously
belongs in The Greatest Story Ever Told. ;) |
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I don't think so. The number of possible final differences is very low and there are a lot of four letter words. That technique seems anyway about the same as assigning codes to a limited number of dictionary entries and just using those.
If you wanted to avoid losing information, you'd have to represent all the differences as well as the initial value -- which would, I think, actually take an extra bit per character for any range of codes. You might be able to identify fancy patterns using differences and represent those -- but then you'll be trying to do something that any ordinary archiving utility already does pretty well. |
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(I don't know much about these things either, though, unfortunately.) |
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I had assumed that jutta's list all compressed down to the
same value, but I didn't bother checking to see if that was
actually the case. |
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Looking at it again, it turns out that the original idea actually depends on there being lots of words with the same length and final difference to... to carry out its purpose. |
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(The other problem for even long words, of course, is that you'd have to go through lots of possibilities for a given length and final difference before you found a known word (which would require you to have a list of all words handy, anyway). I guess you could then store the word-difference/length information for next time, but it still doesn't seem very sensible in a world bursting with good ways of compressing text. Not that that's in any way the point. |
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Won't the "minimum set" idea always be inferior to just dropping letters off the end and trying to match the word from a list? You'll have the same information loss and it will take more space (twice the range for each character) and more effort to find the word. You'll also probably destroy the fine numerological relationships of the letters. On a more positive note, there's a good chance I'm wrong.) |
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