Anagrams live at the delightful hyperdimensional intersection of mathematics, language, whimsy, and art. Lodged in my mind for almost a decade has been the phrase "Harmonic Motel" — a scrambled version of the letters that compose "Michael Morton", who also calls himself "Mr. Machine Tool". What great nicknames!

Long ago Morton implemented a clever algorithm to generate plausible permutations of letters for a human, who can then scan and select good anagrammatic possibilities. It's a wonderful example of IA: Intelligence Augmentation, productive man-machine collaboration to attack fierce combinatorial problems.

My (or more precisely, "our") best anagram discovery using Morton's program? Take "Supreme Court" and transform it into the topical message: "Corrupt? Sue me!"

(see also IntelligenceAugmentation (25 Aug 2001), ArsMagna (27 Sep 2002), ... )

TopicLanguage - TopicProgramming - TopicHumor - 2003-10-23

(correlates: SoulNumbingTedium, IntelligenceAugmentation, ConfucianHomilies, ...)