Re: VMs: Proof, a la Rugg. that the german language is nothing but a hoax (shorter and perhaps more interesting)

[Pierre Abbat <phma@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Friday 10 September 2004 14:55, Michael Winkelmann wrote:
> I wrote a little program and called it "nonsense" - it takes an
> arbitrary text as input and generates random and meaningless output with
> the same entropy in groups of N characters. That's what I call "data
> processing": fine input and gibberish output. ;-)
>
> (If someone want to experiment with the program - contact me via mail.)

I would like to.

> Of course I checked my program by processing some amount of meaningful
> text. A few weeks ago I began to write an introducting essay about the
> VM in german language (I am a native speaker), and I decided to test my
> program on it.
>
> I assume that most readers of the mailing list do not understand german.
> If you look at the following paragraphs of text, you may find it
> difficult to decide which of them is german text and which is nonsense:
>
>   Bei jedem heutigen Entschlüsselungsversuch und
>   jeder anderen Form der Forschung am Text des
>   Manuskriptes wird man einen Computer zur Hilfe
>   nehmen wollen, das ist gar keine Frage. Und damit
>   stellt sich ein Problem, welches die Schwierigkeiten
>   der Symbolinterpretation auf die Spitze treibt:
>   Der Text muss in einer Form vorliegen, die mit
>   Hilfe eines Computerprogrammes zu verarbeiten ist.
>
>   Beine Eine Schrauenles Buch ebe sind scher
>   Zustracher Um wicht sind. So bekannen das Editors
>   wüsser Fraus als einem ist sind ja schen noch gut
>   ungen nich ein Objekten. Wer Annahme: Im an einender
>   an durchspracht gewöhnliche Kulturmentielem, wares
>   Mitten Dabet nache beschließensichkeits das Manuskript,
>   dem Gruppen ihm ein des Notationen hine kleidung, Dokume
>   ermöglichen Textes sind.

I know enough German that the second looks odd, with "Um" capitalized in the 
middle of a sentence, "Schrauenles" which looks like it should be 
"schrauenlos" though I'm not sure what a schraue is, etc. The first one took 
a few seconds to make sense of, but I got: By every today decryption research 
and every other form of research on text of the manuscript, one will want to 
take a computer to help, there is no question of that.

I'd like to take a text in some non-Latin script, such as Russian or Greek, 
and run the program on the UTF-8 encoding of the text and see if it comes up 
with any garbage characters.

phma
-- 
li fi'u vu'u fi'u fi'u du li pa
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