This little gem comes from October 20, 2006. I had just heard about the research saying that as long as you keep the first and last letters of a word in place the order of the other letters doesn’t matter. Supposedly your mind will still figure out the correct order. It turns out that this e-mail forward wasn’t as impressive as it made out to be, but the script was fun to make anyways. Here’s what the e-mail said:

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

I was playing with Ruby at the time, so I put together a short script to make those kinds of sentences. Here’s the code:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
puts "Enter your phrase to be mixed"
def swap(a,b) ($x[a],$x[b] = $x[b],$x[a]) if (a > 0 && a < $x.length - 2) end
myarray = STDIN.readline.split(' ').each {|$x| $x.split('').each_index { |w| swap(w, rand($x.length - 2) + 1)}}
puts myarray.join(' ')

If you want to try it, save it to as a Ruby file on a computer with Ruby installed, and run it from the command line. It will ask you for a line of text. Each word (or space separated group of characters) will keep its first and last character in place, while the others will be mixed up.

Apparently I used this script to explain Ruby to someone, as I also found an explanation file:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

# prints the prompt
puts "Enter your phrase to be mixed"

# defines a new subroutine named 'swap(a,b)'. swap takes two parameters
def swap(a,b)
    # In ruby, you can add an if after the operations, as I did here. The operation swaps the items at indexes a and b
    # The if part makes sure we're not swapping the first or last charachters
    ($x[a],$x[b] = $x[b],$x[a]) if (a > 0 && a < $x.length - 2)
# End of the subroutine
end

#sets the variable myarray to the results of the operation
#STDIN.readline -- Get one line from stdin (ie. from the terminal)
#.split(' ') -- split the preceding object on each space and put into an array
#.each -- for each element in the array (handle defined here as global variable |$x|) do what follows the variable declaration
#$x.split('') -- split on each letter and put into the array
#.each_index -- similar to each, but instead, the variable (|w|) is the index of each element, one at a time
#swap(w,z) -- call the swap subroutine with parameters of w and z
#rand($x.length -2) + 1) -- gives a random index in the word not including the first or last letter
myarray = STDIN.readline.split(' ').each {|$x| $x.split('').each_index { |w| swap(w, rand($x.length - 2) + 1)}}

#prints each element of the myarray variable with a space in between
puts myarray.join(' ')

So that’s that. Maybe it’ll help with learning Ruby? Or making funny sentences? Or wasting your time?