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The Logic of the Anagram
The principle of the anagram is the principle of arrangement - anagrammatic operations on the levels of words, phrases, and strings of words are some of the simplest and yet most affecting machine writings. It is witnessing the mechanism learning to spell.
LETTERI broke the letter of it to keep the sense. - Alfred Lord Tennyson. [Learnt fondly, snored.] [Sly, fat,
nerd Londoner.][Old loner, trendy fans.] |
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Letter: One of 26 common values in the English alphabet (QWERTY set), with capitals, accents and punctuation diregarded.
The style of letters ought to be free, easy, and natural. - Walsh.
None could expound what this letter meant. - Chaucer.
We must observe the letter of the law, without doing violence to the reason of the law and the intention of the lawgiver. - Jer. Taylor.
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Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913)
WordNet (r) 1.6
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WORDWhy should calamity be full of words? - William Shakespeare. [I am a weakish speller.][I'll make
a wise phrase.][We all make his praise.] |
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Word: A valid finite set of letters arranged in a particular order, capitals, accents and punctuation regardless.
Amongst men who confound their ideas with words, there must be endless disputes. - Locke.
A glutton of words. - Piers Plowman
In the beginning, there was the word. |
From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) (web1913)
5. Signal; order; command; direction. WordNet (r) 1.6
The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (05 Sep 00)
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DICTIONARYI applied myself to the perusal of our writers; and noting whatever might be of use to ascertain or illustrate any word or phrase, accumulated in time the materials of a dictionary. - Dr Samuel Johnson. [Shod journals, men.][O, shun major
lends!] |
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Dictonary: The set of all valid words (sets of letters) listed in a single resource (a lexicon or word list).
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Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913)
WordNet (r) 1.6
The Devil's Dictionary ((c)1911 Released April 15 1993)
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ANAGRAMThe law of the anagram is the
law of symbolic conservation of mass. |
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Anagram: A word, such that its set of letters are exactly equivalent to the set of letters in another word. |
Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913)
WordNet (r) 1.6
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The Anagram in Practice
Given the laws above, consider a reflexive example:
| Anagram |
| A NAG MAR A NAG ARM A NAG RAM A RANG AM A RANG MA A RAG MAN ANAGRAM MANA RAG AMRA NAG RAG AM AN RAG MA AN |
Thus a SORTER can generate a wide variety of anagrams, including a ROSTER of perfect anagrams, the REST OR remainder being perfect matches with are not whole words. A final SET of partials might be considered as a last RESORT.
The two raw result sets in the linds above were generated by the
(http://www.wordsmith.org/anagram)
Consdering these sets raises an important point in anagram generation which is exploied by most such services. When extrapolated into phrases, sentences, and passages, a common special exception to the law of the anagram is that blank spaces are not conserved. This special exception is important, because relatively few words or phrases in the dictionary have exact anagrams when spaces are held constant - ANAGRAM, for example, itself has no anagram unless space is considered fluid. Once it is, an anagram is also A RAG MAN - tattered in three segments, but perhaps none the worse for wear.
Within the constraint system described thus far, a machine can create data dumps of anagrammatic content. Take for example an anagrammatic confrontation between our trusty authors, this project, and the mechanism.
| Jeremy Hart Douglass | constrained authorings | Elizabeth Freudenthal |
| (9922) | (23811) | (25001) |
Click on a link to load the result set from the Internet Anagram Server, but be warned - it will take to load, and an interminable time to read.
The problem is that the mechanism of the anagram itself because wildly generative when spaces are not held constant, yet in a multi-word context 99% of anagrammatic outputs make no sense - letters are arranged in a valid order to make words, however sets of words are not arranged or even clustered to create grammatic or conceptual coherancy. The mechanism has returned to firing grapeshot wildly at the target of language, hoping for a hit.
Filtering Anagrammatic Content
Many anagram server systems recognize the desire for sense in the excercise, and have added levels of processing to filter results down to those which will entertain and delight rather than simply fulfill the logical requirements of the excercise. A good example is
AnagramGenius
(http://www.anagramgenius.com/)
which site offers many sophisticated name manipulation services, and gives back results which have been filtered for topicality and interest. Many of their more advanced functions are accessible on a pay basis only, and they sell a client-side version of their software.
Out of 9922 possible anagrams returned by the original system for Jeremy Hart Douglass, and 25001 for Elizabeth Freudenthal, AnagramGenius returns only 100 for each - not the first 100, but the result set filtered according to a mechanical difference of interest. [Note that as the two services are probably using slightly different dictionaries, their results will never be exactly analogous]. This definition apparently includes words being as long as possible, and also possibly an index rating system of interest which has been compiled by humans (i.e. master is ranked as more interesting than stream). Although the concept of grammatic sense or thematic coherancy is not approached by the mechanism, these simple principles are used to return only those results which are assumed to be the most interesting - with the hope that interest may influence reception and thus coincide with coherancy.
| Jeremy Hart Douglass | constrained authorings | Elizabeth Freudenthal |
| (100) |
(100) |
(100) |
| Jeremy Hart Douglass | constrained authorings | Elizabeth Freudenthal |
| (100) |
(100) |
(100) |
These files were returned by AnagramGenius using its free server feature, which emails a result set to the user.
As the size of the anagramatic operation increases, the size of the result set to be dealt with (preferrably mechanically before being read by human eyes) increases exponentially. This is in part a curse, but in part a blessing - after all, the number of things one can say with few symbols or words which 'make sense' are extremely limited - that is the nature of baby talk. When one increases scope, this becomes less of a problem. For example, the phrase "symbolic conservation of mass" anagrams easily into:
A fictive ABC. So mourn my loss, son.
Although as a textual fragment it is at least as nonsensical as many of the shorter generations ("Ghastly, re-used major?") human creativity can stare at its rorchak and quickly cobble together a narrative explanation of how the output is logically connected to the input. The anagram, or symbolic conservation of mass, is here lambasted by a weary paternal author-figure as "a fictive ABC." This machine writing seems to have led to the loss of traditional human the author, which the child is told to mourn.
Maybe a stretch. But with thousands upon thousands of results to pick and choose from, and the relative ease of assembling 10 word sets (as opposed to 4 or 3 words) into sentences and clauses, human readers have all the stretching room in the world. The question is, will the mechanism grow more advanced in doing its own picking and choosing at the level of the paragraph... the sentence? Or does this kind of meaning generation require an entirely new logic, with an entirely new set of components?
Even as the systems stand today, there is much to be done in teaching the mechanism to sing. For example, the Tennyson and Johnson anagrams listed above were based on machine output - based on, but reordered by the authors to create narrative effect. Is this reordering merely a step away for the mechanism? Conside that it took several hours of creative processing for the humans to attain even dubious results. O, shun major lends! barely makes sense even with a detailed knowledge of Johnson's history of problems with sponsorship. As for rendering is his habit of writing introductions and biographical sketches as Shod journals, men... well, an implication rather than an explication, and one gets the feeling that the energy put into it might not always be got out again.
Perhaps mechanizing this next step to 'sense' is far more difficult than teaching the mechanism to speak from scratch?
When information wants
to be free, all use is fair.
However, Webster's 1913 has a special place in
the world
of contemporary machine writings in all areas.
They require the processing of text en masse -
and it is currently public domain.
special thanks to the
free
Hypertext Webster
Gateway service.
constrained authorings, copyleft 2000
elizabeth freudenthal and jeremy douglass
ucsb hyperfictions seminar in english
professor alan liu
all writes re-served