What Does That Screen Say?   A Quick Lesson Let's say we encountered the following little block of text: When you first look at it, it doesn't seem to make much sense. But try thinking of the spaces as not spaces between words, but blanks. Now the question becomes, what goes in those blanks? Think of those questions from standardized tests where they give you a series of numbers with one missing. You need to use the rest of each line to see a pattern that will help you fill in the blank. Doing that with our little block of text, we can fill in the blanks with what belongs. Below, the letters that used to be blanks are in yellow. So basically what we have in each line is a repeating set of characters. With me? OK. It's fairly easy to fill in the blanks because we recognize the alphabetic and numeric patterns. But what about when the pattern is a little harder to recognize? Here's a more complex block of text to ponder: It's possible to make out a single word here or there, but most of the "words" are gibberish. Like the last example, there's a repeating pattern in each line, where the spaces are actually blanks. So let's fill in those blanks: So in the first line, we see the word "dictionary", and in the last line we see the phrase "find me now". But notice there's still a blank in the second line; that's because the line ends before the pattern can repeat itself, so we never get to see what would have come after the "O". With a little brain work, a knowledge of the English language, and some experience watching Wheel of Fortune, you can figure out that the word hidden in the second line is "crossword". But what if you didn't speak English? You wouldn't know what a crossword was, so you might never figure out what goes in that blank. You'd also never know if the letters were changed to a different alphabet. Continue on to Page 4: The Repeating Pattern

This page last modified on 8/25/2006
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