the rompe blog

Just got this by email:

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.

I don't know if this really was a university project, but for sure it
is amazing what the human brain is able to do. And it does it even if
we don't realize it! We create a tiny interface for communication
using only 26 characters, and the brain remembers thousands of whole
words instead.

And why? Because our brain is fast. Our brain's strength is not
number crunching through complex algorithms, it's just speed. Another
example is face recognition: People are searching for technical
solutions for visually recognizing persons in a way a human would do
it. They had invented systems that vectorize faces to get only 36
bytes of information per face that have to be compared to the
database. And then they found out what a human brain is doing instead:
It takes the whole amount of information and compares it to it's
gigantic memory with an enormous speed. No complex calculation, less
optimization, just power.

Isn't all this inelegant? We are primates. But we are still better
than every computer we have built so far...

Update 2003-09-16: Now the scrambled sentence has made it into this Slashdot article.