4 ms·

Maybe it's a simplistic explanation, but I would think that this was caused by the vast amount of multi-language sites in which pages in languages other than en

Maybe it's a simplistic explanation, but I would think that this was caused by the vast amount of multi-language sites in which pages in languages other than english have not been written yet, so selecting one of them displays the lorem ipsum (probably google translate identifies this untranslated pages as latin even though they were supposed to be language X).

mjburgess 12y ago
The problem is the consistent politicization of each word in ways related to intelligence and the extremely good properties of lorem ipsum text (its nonesense that doesn't stand out as nonesense - a holy grail of ciphers). Its possible that this is statistical noise... but it seems particularly plausible that it started out that way then some one gamed it into being far less noisey and more consistently intelligence-based.
- johnlbevan2 12y ago
  I suspect words such as Company and China are pretty commonplace on the internet, so the data used for Google to learn is likely to include a number of these mapped to Lorem Ipsums. Sentences making sense could be down to another part of the algorithm - Google doesn't just do word for word translation, but tries to map meanings based on the context of the sentence, and to ensure the output sentence is grammatically correct in the new language - as such the algorithms distort the results into sentences which would be unlikely to appear by chance, making them more appealing to us when suggesting conspiracy.
xorcist 12y ago
The small corpus makes it very easy to game the translation. I think it was done on purpose for the DEFCON competition mentioned elsewhere is this thread. The translation must have stayed fixed for at least during the conference if it should have worked, so I bet Lost published a lot of dummy material to make it so. It would also make the cryptic references to CIA and stuff a bit easier to believe.

mjburgess 12y ago

The problem is the consistent politicization of each word in ways related to intelligence and the extremely good properties of lorem ipsum text (its nonesense that doesn't stand out as nonesense - a holy grail of ciphers). Its possible that this is statistical noise... but it seems particularly plausible that it started out that way then some one gamed it into being far less noisey and more consistently intelligence-based.

johnlbevan2 12y ago
I suspect words such as Company and China are pretty commonplace on the internet, so the data used for Google to learn is likely to include a number of these mapped to Lorem Ipsums. Sentences making sense could be down to another part of the algorithm - Google doesn't just do word for word translation, but tries to map meanings based on the context of the sentence, and to ensure the output sentence is grammatically correct in the new language - as such the algorithms distort the results into sentences which would be unlikely to appear by chance, making them more appealing to us when suggesting conspiracy.

xorcist 12y ago

The small corpus makes it very easy to game the translation. I think it was done on purpose for the DEFCON competition mentioned elsewhere is this thread. The translation must have stayed fixed for at least during the conference if it should have worked, so I bet Lost published a lot of dummy material to make it so. It would also make the cryptic references to CIA and stuff a bit easier to believe.