Jonathon Blake <wd803@freenet.victoria.bc.ca> writes: [ Various words of Tim May, Martin Hamilton, Monty Harder, Harry Bartholomew, and myself elided. ] [ Re: plotters and Metafonts: ]
Making the little problem Tim presents, a major headache for somebody else --- handwriting analysts. ... Actually, True Type fonts of your handwriting are available, for any platform that accepts that font type.
It needs to be more complicated than this, however, because if just a font is used then each 'e' looks like every other--easy to detect.
Tim May > Of course this is also similar to the "style Tim May > detectors" we so often talk about.
I don't remember the program name, but there is software available now, that analyzes a document, and figures out who wrote it --- based on the frequency count of the letters of the alphabet. Secondary measures are frequency counts of letter pairs. Words, phrases, sentences etc are totally ignored. So what you'd need to do here, to pass your pseudo- Turing Test is a program that generates different statistical results, for allegedly different people.
Interesting. I've not heard of this. The situation bears a great similarity to stego--you need to emulate a statistical pattern to make it undetectable, and if your opponents statistics are more sophisticated than yours, you'll be found out. [ Re: Introducing simulated spelling and typographical errors: ]
Actually, the usual give away, is in letter and letter pair frequencies --- not spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, etc.
However, there a technique called _Scientific Content ANalysis_ that looks at how things are said, to judge their "truthfulness." A good program will not show that the text was randomly generated, nor show that the author is off-the- wall, so to speak.
Then again, what are the chances that Congressional staffers will be using such sophisticated methods to sort out the 'astroturf'? If a staffer is suspicious but then sees "recieved" and "I been" and "heplful" and decides, "Okay, this was written by a human," well, that's Good Enough for Government Work, as they say. -- David R. Conrad, ab411@detroit.freenet.org, http://web.grfn.org/~conrad/ Finger conrad@grfn.org for PGP 2.6 public key; it's also on my home page Key fingerprint = 33 12 BC 77 48 81 99 A5 D8 9C 43 16 3C 37 0B 50 No, his mind is not for rent to any god or government.