[l33tman]

Rmiedns me of the fun fact taht (msot) hmanus can ftulleny raed txet wrhee you sralbcme all the ltertes of all the wrdos as long as you keep the frist and last ctaerachr the smae. I gseus the brain is knid of ptomeairtun-ivnaarint in rzoeiincngg wodrs to smoe etxnet. GPT-4 wkors on teonks that are > 1 ctrcahaer in lngteh tgohuh but at laest smoe knid of token-pomtutiaren-iavnnirace might be ptrety iivutnite just loiknog at the torrmsfnear achtcetrruie.

Reminds me of the fun fact that (most) humans can fluently read text where you scramble all the letters of all the words as long as you keep the first and last character the same. I guess the brain is kind of permutation-invariant in recognizing words to some extent. GPT-4 works on tokens that are > 1 character in length though but at least some kind of token-permutation-invariance might be pretty intuitive just looking at the transformer architecture.

OK, the scrambling wasn't super-easy to read in this case, with the long words :)

[FabHK]

That’s a bit of an urban legend.

https://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/matt.davis/cmabridge/

https://www.sciencealert.com/word-jumble-meme-first-last-let...

[pixel8account]

Saying it's an urban legend implies it's false, but that's a bit nitpicky IMO. Most people can read most such "scrambled" sentences without a lot of effort, so that part is certainly true (and non-obvious). The original - fact checked in your sources - made don't strong assumptions like "Cambridge researchers", "can be a total mess (...) read without a problem" etc. But overall I still think that's a neat fact.

[mcpackieh]

Your links suggest that the attribution of the discovery of this phenomenon to a Cambridge researcher is an urban legend. But l33tman's comment doesn't make that claim, he only says that words scrambled in this way are easy to read (and they are, I read his comment effortlessly.)