Cryptography Reference
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same sound? It's just a coincidence. She'll probably spend all of her
time picking up patterns in our lives. I'll have to keep saying, “No. I
still love you. I just want to watch the seventh game of the World Series.
The Red Sox are in it this year. It's tied. They might actually win! This
is
not
a sign of a bad relationship. ” Geez.
SF ISO SM. Fast cars, fast boats and fast horses
are for me.
Don't write. Send a telegram.
Great. Has she ever fallen off of a fast horse? They're animals. They
only tolerate us on their backs as long as the oats are fresh. Women are
the same way. But they don't take to a rein as well. And they don't just
want fresh oats. I bet fast food isn't on her list. She'll ride along and
take me for whatever I've got. Then she'll grab a fast plane out of my
life. No way. Her boat's sinking already. Geez.
6.2 Running in Reverse
The cynic looking for a date in the introduction to this chapter has
the ability to take a simple advertisement and read between the lines
until he's plotted the entire arc of the relationship and followed it to
its doom. Personal ads have an elaborate shorthand system for com-
pressing a person's dreams into less than 100 words. The shorthand
evolved over the years as people learned to pick up the patterns in
what people wanted. “ISO” means “In Search Of” for example. The
cynic was just using his view of the way that people want to expand
the bits of data into a reality that has little to do with the incoming
data.
This chapter is about creating an automatic way of taking small,
innocuous bits of data and embellishing them with deep, embroi-
dered details until the result mimics something completely differ-
ent. Thedataishiddenasitassumesthiscostume. Theeffectis
accomplished here by running the Huffman compression algorithm
described in Chapter 5 in reverse. Ordinarily, the Huffman algorithm
would approximate the statistical distribution of the text and then
convert it into a digital shorthand. Running this in reverse can take
normal data and form it into elaborate patterns.
Figure 6.1 is a good place to begin. The text in this figure was cre-
ated using a fifth-order regular mimic function by analyzing an early
draft of Chapter 5. The fifth-order statistical profile of the chapter
was created by counting all possible sets of five letters in a row that
occur. In the draft, the five letters 'mpres' occur together in that order
84 times. Given that these letters are part of the word 'compression',
